Daring Bakers

It would have been so easy to take a pass on the June Daring Baker’s Challenge. I’ve been baking at work for weeks to complete a big fall recipe project that will appear in the October issue of Homemakers so my sweet tooth was more than satisfied. In fact, as the calendar changed from May to June, I was leaning toward making this a DB-free month.

Then everything changed. I saw that the challenge was to make a Danish Braid and I was in! I’ve made puff pastry millions of times and when I was 14 or 15 I perfected my recipe for a quick bread version of Danish Braid that became the cornerstone of my brother’s hockey team’s bake sale fundraisers. But, after more than 30 years of baking, I had never attempted the true Danish pastry that combines bread making and puff pastry techniques.

The recipe we were to use was selected and presented by Kelly of Sass and Veracity and Ben of What’s Cooking. Please visit their sites to get this terrific recipe. This is a large dough recipe so I froze half (I plan to use my left over pastry later in the season to make custard and Niagara peach filled Danishes.) but you can simply cut the ingredients in half and make less. Once I finish this dough, I likely will make another batch. It’s really that good!

As you can see from the picture above, my Danish Braid turned out a bit dark; however, the texture and flavour were excellent. I found the Danish to be a little under-sweetened, so after this picture was taken I added a drizzle made by blending icing sugar, a gob of butter, and whipping cream together to make a fluid consistency. (This mixture is just a slightly thicker version of the glaze I use for my homemade doughnuts, btw). I transferred this glaze mixture to a plastic bag, nipped off one corner and then drizzled the gooey goodness over the pastry in a zigzag pattern.

Gourmet cupcakes in a jar

I love cupcakes. Not only is that not news, it doesn’t prove me to be original or unusual either. I’ve discovered that cupcakes are truly a defining icon of our present day society. From the little cakes themselves to whimsical art that animates the cupcake with human characteristics to snazzy t-shirts that let you have your cupcake and be stylin’, too, cupcakes are universally popular.

And just when it seemed like my cupcake love couldn’t deepen, I discover yet another way to enjoy these beguiling little treats: in a jar. “But why?” you ask? Forgive me but I counter with “why not?”

Not only are cupcakes in a jar less messy to eat, they’re portable and they make people smile! Although you can easily make your own (like we did at the Test Kitchen – that’s our handy work above), you also can buy these yummies ready-made.

• In Canada, contact Milsean bakery in Abbotsford, B.C. (I hear their buttercrunch candy is great, too); their birthday cakes, Irish apple cakes and figgy puddings are baked in jars. They’ve been unavailable for the last 6 months due to jar supply issues but are back!

• In the US, Fat Daddy Bakery in Illinois is widely acknowledged as the originator of the cupcake in a jar concept. I haven’t tried their product but the buzz I hear is all good.

Would you eat a cupcake from a jar? Or, perhaps a better question is how many cupcakes in a jar do you think you could eat before you needed to be a person on a couch?

Doughnut making: a patriotic duty

We knew that doughnuts weren’t health food when I was a kid but my grandmother still made them often. (Other regular items on her menus were cinnamon buns, a silky, chilled potato and Swiss chard borscht finished with sweet, rich cream and a slew of other super yummy stuff that today would be classified as ‘bad.’) My Baba’s doughnuts were light, fluffy yeast leavened pillows that she either dusted with icing sugar or served with homemade jam. I didn’t drink coffee in those days but they would have been great with java.

In those days, making doughnuts was great fun but unnecessary because Canada was still a Mecca for doughnut lovers. We had Tim Horton’s and Mister Donut where onsite several times a day fresh donuts were fried and glazed. Anytime you went to one of these shops, rows of doughnuts sat ready to help you through your sweet craving.

Today Mr. Donut is a faded memory at best and Tim Horton’s is now in the coffee and sandwich business. As a result, they’ve modified their doughnuts to streamline production. In fact, I heard the doughnuts now arrive at TH stores frozen and par-cooked. The result is that their doughnuts are sadly heavy and much less appealing than they once were.

Due to these changes in the Canadian restaurant landscape, I’ve had to dust off my doughnut making skills and fry up my own at home when I get a hankering for my national snack. There’s just no other way to get a satisfying doughnut.

You’re likely reading this post and thinking that I’ve flipped. In light of what we all know about nutrition, how can I be advocating making doughnuts? Before you close your mind, remember: doughnuts are part of our Canadian food heritage. We must put our health aside to preserve our culture for future generations. It’s our patriotic duty to dig on doughnuts! Honest.

Ready to get started? The doughnuts pictured above were made using the basic coffee cake dough in Anne Willan’s classic Lavarenne Practique cookbook but I’m sure any other coffeecake dough would work as well (for fritters try brioche dough). If you prefer cake doughnuts, try this recipe from the Homemaker’s archive.

Also, if you know a place that still sells great doughnuts, be sure to note it below so that we can all support these noble destinations.

My trip to the opera

I almost didn’t do this month’s Daring Baker’s Challenge. Not only was my time short and my ass disturbingly enlarged by other eating, but the recipe for a white-on-white Opera Cake (chosen by the founders of the group, Ivonne and Lis) was rather involved. And, truth be told, my friend Dean makes a truly wonderful classic Opera Cake that I can have anytime I drop by his bakery Amadeus Fine Cakes. (If I invited Dean to come over to play guitar hero, he’d likely deliver one to me as well.)

But, I’ve been really enjoying being a member of the Daring Bakers so I felt that it was important that I do this challenge no matter what. After all, when you join a group, you make a commitment, right?

I ended up rushing through my cake. I made the glaze, the buttercream and the syrup late at night and made the mousse and baked and assembled the cake a day and a half later with a houseful of company. As a result, I didn’t get the best looking result. My buttercream layers weren’t very even and my mousse layer was visible here and there through the glaze. It wasn’t a showstopper but the cake tasted great and the recipe, although long, worked well.

Now that I’ve finished my third DB challenge, one thing is puzzling me. What do the other Daring Bakers do with all of the stuff they bake?

Each month I’ve had copious amounts of extra baked goods.

• March was Dorie Greenspan’s Perfect Party Cake which I served at my Easter Feaster. I had nine at the table and still had a quarter of a cake left over.
• April was Jill O’Connor’s Chocolate Dipped Cheesecake Lollies. I scaled down the recipe, used only half the cheesecake and still had enough lollies to send home with my dinner guests (we were six that night).
• Now this month, we made this cream coloured Opera Cake. Despite having eight for dinner, I still had half a cake left over! I froze the leftovers to serve the next weekend, but I’m finding it fatiguing to manage my DB wares.

I hope the next challenge features a recipe that can be either easily scaled down or that is not meant to cater a huge party. Tune in next month to see what they throw at me!

Daring Bakers challenge: cheesecake lollies

April has been a crazy month for me. I’ve been in Vancouver, Edmonton and New Orleans as well as carried a full workload of creative projects at work. As a result, I really didn’t feel like heading into the kitchen for the Daring Baker’s Challenge this time around.

Don’t get me wrong, I had nothing against the recipe or the group but I just didn’t feel like doing anything extra with my one free Saturday at home this month. But, since being part of a group occasionally requires effort and compromise, I pulled out my mixer, found my sprinkles and got baking. After all, the recipe for cheesecake pops, chosen by Elle and Deborah, is simple and well written by Jill O’Connor. (Regular readers will recognize Jill’s name as one of the authors I showcased in December during Book Week and this month’s DB recipe is from her book Sticky, Chewy, Messy, Gooey that I recommended in that post.)

So, I entered the kitchen feeling optimistic that things would go well. Unfortunately, when I unwrapped my room temperature cream cheese, one of the bricks was strange: curdy and sour smelling. Definitely not worthy of use. So, I tossed the bad brick into the compost bucket, got out my calculator and scaled the recipe down by 20%. To compensate for using a smaller volume of batter, I used a 9-inch (23-cm) cake pan (one of the same ones I used for last month’s challenge). I was a little worried that my math might not lead to a usable cheesecake but fortunately my calculations worked out and it all turned out well.

To compound my good luck, an hour after I finished making the lollies and was wondering what in the world I would do with them (we aren’t big on cheesecake at our house), the phone rang. It was a friend who I was able to persuade to come over the next day with her husband and sweet tooth daughter for a casual Sunday meal. My young friend loved the lollies so much that she took home the leftovers to share with her grandmother and asked for the recipe so that she can make them for her own birthday party. Perfecto!