The Daring Kitchen

Aug 27, 2010     7 Comments    Posted in: Blog, News

Lately I have been spending time over at a site called “SITS” – The Secret is in the Sauce. It is a support site for women bloggers. It has been a great resource and I probably spend too much time over there. But, one of the sites it led me to is “The Daring Kitchen“, a place where people learn to be better cooks by participating in monthly challenges. I thought it would be a fun thing for B and I to try. They have two sections, The Daring Baker (mostly desserts) and The Daring Cook (mostly dinner recipes), with a challenge for each section posted on the first of the month. We decided to try The Daring Baker, of course. Our first challenge was to pick one of two recipes (or, if we were more daring, do both). The recipes were Baked Alaska and petit fours made with ice cream. I was going to have us do both, but realized neither of us really likes meringue, so we decided to stick with the petit fours.

This was definitely a challenge. We had to start with homemade ice cream… without the ice cream maker. They gave us the recipe for the ice cream and then a link to a recipe for making it without the machine. I wasn’t sure it would work, but we gave it a shot.

The next thing to make was the Brown Butter Pound Cake that was used as the base for the petit fours. I had never even heard of brown butter before. The recipe said to melt the butter until the milk solids turned brown and smelled nutty… nutty?? We weren’t sure about that one, but sure enough it started to smell like peanuts. Very strange.

As you can see, I did not have a cake leveler so when I split the cake into two pieces it came out on more of a diagonal. Oops. We also did not have a 9 inch pan, just an 8 inch, therefore the cake was a lot thicker than it should have been. The ice cream worked great though! I had no idea you could make ice cream without a machine. I will be doing this more often from now on.

Because the cake was taller than it should have been, the petit fours had to be much bigger. Definitely not “petite”. I don’t think I’ll be signing up as a pastry chef anytime soon, but they are delicious…

One important lesson I learned with this challenge is how difficult it can be to take pictures along the way, especially when dealing with ice cream. Trying to get any decent shots without it melting all over the place was almost impossible. Plus, I seemed to have a problem remembering to actually get the camera out in the first place before we finished with each step! This is a fun challenge though, and we both decided that no matter what it looks like the results will be worth it.

Cooking is like love. It should be entered into with abandon or not at all.
~ Harriet van Horne

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