The Perfect Day for Baked Alaska

San Francisco is typically at its coldest in the summer, with foggy, barely 60-degree days.  Not this week, however.  This week it hit nearly 100 degrees: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/08/25/BAER1F2QH9.DTL. HOT!  Especially when you don't have air conditioning.

And in this unseasonably hot weather, I attempted Baked Alaska alone, without my baking companion, Sara.  Both of us have been traveling throughout August, taking our "bar trips," and we only had one evening of overlap in the Bay Area - not enough time to undertake this month's challenge.  I missed her in the kitchen!

I tried to do the true baking portions of the recipe in the morning to avoid the hottest part of the day.  Lucky me - I had some help from our friend Cat, who was staying at my house during the heat wave in between her own post-bar travels.  She took pictures as I frantically assembled the quickly melting pieces of this dessert.

First, the brown butter pound cake:

Next, Kahlua brownie ice cream, per Cat's request:

Then, the meringue:

I am so glad I invested in a decent set of pastry tips.  More meringue piping:

And then, after some freezing time, we busted out the blowtorch!

And scorched the meringue:

Ever the manly man, TJ wielded the blow torch while I took pictures.  Perfect result!

And the interior was perfect, too:

This was definitely a great dessert to enjoy at the end of a hot day.

The August 2010 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Elissa of 17 and Baking. For the first time, The Daring Bakers partnered with Sugar High Fridays for a co-event and Elissa was the gracious hostess of both. Using the theme of beurre noisette, or browned butter, Elissa chose to challenge Daring Bakers to make a pound cake to be used in either a Baked Alaska or in Ice Cream Petit Fours. The sources for Elissa’s challenge were Gourmet magazine and David Lebovitz’s “The Perfect Scoop”.

For my version, I used two additional recipes.  For the brownies, I used a tried-and-true recipe from The Wednesday Chef, which makes very fudgy brownies: http://www.thewednesdaychef.com/

the_wednesday_chef/2010/02/alice-medrichs-cocoa-brownies.html.  For the Kahlua ice cream, I used a new (to me) recipe, with delicious results: http://www.foodnetwork.com/
recipes/kahlua-chip-ice-cream-recipe/index.html.  Instead of stirring in the semi-sweet chocolate at the end, I just chopped my chilled brownies into bite-size pieces and stirred them in while the ice cream was still soft, and then let it harden in the tea cup molds in the freezer.  I had brownies and ice cream left over for later enjoyment!

Baking and the Bar, Part II

When this post comes live, Erica and I will be in day one of the California Bar Exam. Scary stuff people, scary stuff.

And what do Erica and I do when we're about to encounter scary stuff?

Apparently we make ice cream cake.

Sorry for the short post/iPhone photo this time around. We'll be back in full force soon!

The July 2010 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Sunita of Sunita’s world – life and food. Sunita challenged everyone to make an ice-cream filled Swiss roll that’s then used to make a bombe with hot fudge. Her recipe is based on an ice cream cake recipe from Taste of Home.

Baking and the Bar -- Pavlovas

Sara and I have entered a dark time in our lives.  We are studying for the California Bar.  What does this entail?  Usually 3 or more hours of dry bar lecture -- though sometimes we are lucky and get to listen to 7 hours of it! -- followed by another 4 or more hours of practice questions, essays, and studying.  Yuck, right?

Yeah.  Yuck yuck yuck!

So it's not surprising that we jumped at the chance to take a break with this month's Challenge.  In fact, we were especially excited for it because both of us are big fans of meringue, and Sara adores pavlovas in particular.

We're getting to be pros at anything involving whipping up some egg whites or cream, and then folding in chocolate or whatever other deliciousness, so this recipe posed no problems for us.

I finally invested in some proper pastry piping bags and tips, so for the first time we did not struggle with our piping.

We turned out some beautiful shapes for our pavlovas.

They included circles, a rectangle, a Christmas tree, a raindrop (sort of), a little bear's head, a plant sprout, and a star.  Oh, and a certain part of the male anatomy.  (Blame Sara for that last one. Ironic, since she explicitly banned them in any form at her own bachelorette party last weekend!)

Our mousse was a perfect consistency, and we both very much enjoyed the chocolate-orange combination.  In retrospect, we would have wanted to vary the colors a little -- perhaps a lighter, non-chocolate pavlova with the chocolate mousse, or a different flavor mousse with the chocolate pavlova.  Oh well -- next time!

The mascarpone cream added some variety and was quite tasty.  We were ultimately glad that we did not have any Sambucca on hand and had to omit it from the cream, as that seemed like a strange addition to the other flavors.

In the end, our pavlovas looked great and tasted divine.  We can only hope that our success in the kitchen this month can translate to success on the Bar in July!

The June 2010 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Dawn of Doable and Delicious. Dawn challenged the Daring Bakers’ to make Chocolate Pavlovas and Chocolate Mascarpone Mousse. The challenge recipe is based on a recipe from the book Chocolate Epiphany by Francois Payard.

Celebrations!

Erica and I had a lot to celebrate this past month, and we're happy to report that a successful croquembouche helped us do that!

We started this little projected nearly 2 years ago, when we had just finished a tough 1L year. We thought baking (and blogging) would be a nice remedy to way that law school can make you forget about the other things in life - good food, good friends, and new challenges that don't come in the form of rules and statutes. I'm proud to report, that after 3 years of hard work, Erica and I have officially earned the name sake of our blog - we received our juris doctor degrees on May 14th.*

Thanks to the awesome schedulers at BarBri (the bar review course that most newly minted JDs shell out the big bucks for in order to prepare for the bar exam), some of us had a rockin' three days between graduation and the beginning of class. No rest of the weary, huh? So with one of our days off, Erica and I tackled the Croquembouche, and two bottles of champagne...

I made two crème patissiere the night before - plain vanilla and chocolate espresso. The later was the result of a remnant chocolate espresso bar - divine, but I must say that the espresso bean pieces did NOT like going through the pastry bag. I seem to always make that mistake.

The next day, Erica and I set in on making the pate a choux. Easy enough! Adding the eggs in was a big strange - the dough didn't want to absorb any egg for quite some time, but eventually the gloppy mess yielded to a smooth dough. While we waited to bake, we watched Martha and Rachel Maddow assemble Martha's "famous" croquembouche (honestly, what is that woman not famous for?). Watching Rachel and Martha interact was quite entertaining - neither seemed particularly comfortable, but we were impressed on their ability to switch from pate a choux to politics and back to caramel. We were also impressed by the beautiful sugar cookies that they used to decorate - in a spontaneous move, we threw together a batch as well.

Despite the flat dough, Erica assured me that the pate a choux would eventually poof up. And poof it did! We almost took them out of the oven about 20 minutes early (always turn to the next page in a recipe), but only about 3 or 4 suffered in the process.

Filling the poofs was a bit of challenge (see espresso beans, supra), but we eventually got at least some crème patissiere in each of them.

We were nervous about assembling, particularly given our utter failure with the gingerbread house, but the caramel was so sticky that it proved really easy to assemble. We added some decorations in celebration of graduation (like the blue and gold there?), and then sat down to enjoy with friends.
Looking forward to the next one! (Something savory please? And something that doesn't involve suet? :-))

* Not quite lawyers yet though - over the next two months, I'm sure you'll hear more about our adventures in BarBri and tackling the dreaded CA bar.

The May 2010 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Cat of Little Miss Cupcake. Cat challenged everyone to make a piece montée, or croquembouche, based on recipes from Peter Kump’s Baking School in Manhattan and Nick Malgieri.

And the winner is...

We combined this month's challenge with an Oscars party at Erica's house.  Both of us enjoy critiquing red carpet fashion, although we spend most of our time in jeans and t-shirts.  Wasn't Sandra Bullock's dress amazing?  And, we love her, but didn't Meryl Streep kind of look like she was wearing a bathrobe?

Anyway, Erica prepared the caramel and orange segments the night before.  The process was kind of tedious, though the oranges looked pretty.

Despite the multiple blanching steps required, the marmalade was much less trying to make.  It smelled divine, and turned out perfectly.

The pate sablee was one of the easier doughs we've dealt with as Daring Bakers.  The only problem we had was consuming too much of it raw.  However, this is always a problem...

We were a little nervous with our choice of molds.  We used silicone cupcake liners, since that was the best thing we could come up with.  They looked super-cute going into the freezer, all multi-colored with their little cookie tops.

It turned out we had nothing to worry about!  The Tians were a little lumpy and sticky, but ultimately they looked just like they were supposed to.  We especially enjoyed getting a little creative with our caramel sauce designs.  This degree of attractiveness is a fairly rare achievement for us, so we were both very excited!  Our baking usually tastes great, but it doesn't always look too nice.  In fact, the next day when we un-molded a few that had more time in the freezer, they looked 100% perfect.

So we declare these Orange Tians a winner!  Even Sara, who despises cooked fruit to an extreme degree, had a taste and declared them mildly palatable... or at least she liked the cookie part.  And they were a big hit among our usual group of friend-tasters.

The 2010 March Daring Baker’s challenge was hosted by Jennifer of Chocolate Shavings. She chose Orange Tian as the challenge for this month, a dessert based on a recipe from Alain Ducasse’s Cooking School in Paris.

Tiramisu Delight!

Ah, we finally had a complete success. The tiramisu was delicious and beautiful - it's rare that both of those come out in our work. Unfortunately, I think that leads to a much less funny post (no gingerbread prison here....)

Also, no pictures of the marscapone, but was delighted when the very liquid cream miraculously turned into cheese overnight. I had suspected failure, but instead it was spot on.

Next, Erica made the custard - stiring, stiring, stiring.


We were a little confused why we ended up with so many little bowls of similar substances - did anyone else feel that way? Particularly when you just mixed them together in the end?

Next we made the lady fingers. If daring bakers had taught us one thing, it's how to gently fold flour into egg whites.

Our friend Rachel was absolutely delighted to see the final product.


Less clear is how delighted she'll be at us posting this photo. :-)

Till next time!

The February 2010 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Aparna of My Diverse Kitchen and Deeba of Passionate About Baking. They chose Tiramisu as the challenge for the month. Their challenge recipe is based on recipes from The Washington Post, Cordon Bleu at Home and Baking Obsession.

Festive Gingerbread Prison

It's been a long December. It's our third year of law school, and it was hard to rally for a fifth semester of exams. So cut us some slack on this one...

On the bright side, the gingerbread came out of the oven in beautiful shape. We had all kinds of ideas and decorations for our gingerbread house. Indeed, those ideas flow well after a few cups of brandy-spiked mulled cider, some beer, and some wine. And the movie Four Christmases. (Do not watch this movie without good doses of holiday spirit and holiday spirits.)

Building gingerbread houses while intoxicated, however? Not a good idea. Clearly. We could blame it on the consistency of the frosting--yes, it was a little bit off--but let's be honest here, folks: the outcome of this challenge had quite a bit to do with our good friend alcohol.

Note the unusual triangular shape. This was because we broke a few of our walls while trying to attach them. (See broken wall at left, with clever circular window). We made up for it with Snocap detailing above our (one) window and (one) door. Another highlight is the the jellybean "stone" path up to the "door," which was a window in our original design. We improvised.

Observe also the delightful open-air "exercise yard" on the side of the gingerbread prison, with candy cane guard posts. Or stripper poles, for this is a happy, festive prison.

And the coup de grace--a Necco wafer roof, with shredded coconut "snow." How beautiful. And lest you fear our gingerbread prison is not secure, don't miss the gumdrop alarm lights going off at the front of the roof.

Turn your eyes from the screen so as not to be blinded by the perfect beauty of this festive gingerbread prison.

PS--No children were traumatized (or involved) in the construction of this challenge.

The December 2009 Daring Bakers’ challenge was brought to you by Anna of Very Small Anna and Y of Lemonpi. They chose to challenge Daring Bakers’ everywhere to bake and assemble a gingerbread house from scratch. They chose recipes from Good Housekeeping and from The Great Scandinavian Baking Book as the challenge recipes.