Daring Bakers Challenge: Yeasted Meringue Coffee Cake

I began my excursion into the unexplored land of yeasted meringue coffee cake early one morning – my ultimate destination of a brunch consisted solely of coffee cake seemed further away than a fuzzy robe when you wake up and get out of bed on a chilly winter morning.  It turned out, the road to yeasty, sweet, doughy, crunchy bliss was evenly and smoothly paved with an incredibly cooperative, rich dough that was perfectly content without a sprinkle of flour when being kneaded and rolled out.

The rich dough lay naked, awaiting a smooth layer of sticky sweet meringue, a generous sprinkling of cinnamon sugar, and an even more generous sprinkling of toasted pecans and chocolate chips or any other combination of filling one desires.  Being a yeasted coffee cake virgin, I chose to stick to the basics – I didn’t want to overwhelm myself the first time.

The smell of the baking coffee cake was overwhelming.  After an excruciatingly delicious-smelling 25 minutes a wonderfully yeasty creation emerged from the oven.  And as the still warm loaf cooled, my fingers played along it’s marvelously browned crust, I bent down to inhale its intoxicating incense, and my eyes drank in what was soon to be in my belly.  Very soon.  A little too soon for my taste buds in fact, which suffered from a mild first degree burn.  However, a mildly singed tongue was so worth this bready, yeasty, sweet, crunchy, creation.

Thank you Jamie of Life’s a feast for a marvelous challenge and an even more marvelous recipe!

Check out her blog for the recipe, and as a note, I needed a lot less flour when I was in the final mixing stage of the dough – I only used about 1/2 cup more of flour.  I also used a blend of half whole wheat pastry flour and half bread flour.

Daring Bakers – White Chocolate “Panna Cotta” and Florentine Cookies

What began as a challenge to make panna cotta turned into a lazy attempt to make pudding seem like panna cotta.  With no gelatin or any substance of the kind to be found in the house, I was forced to resort to good ol’ cornstarch.  Which meant I was making pudding.  Not panna cotta.  Woops.

Regardless, it made for a fruity, sweet, creamy, and relatively firm pudding, albeit with a few lumps dispersed here and there (I told you it was a lazy attempt).  Thankfully, I was feeding this lumpy pudding to my best friends.  Best friends will still love you even if you give them lumpy pudding.

The Florentine cookies were the perfect accompaniment to the pudding.  As I was melting the butter to make the cookies, I figured, why not brown it?  My philosophy is, if a recipe calls for melted butter, you might as well brown it for that extra layer of flavor.  The nuttiness of the browned butter matched the oats wondrously and what resulted was a sweet, crispy, slightly nutty, buttery cookies sandwiched with a layer of bittersweet chocolate (I love how something sweet, like bittersweet chocolate, can cut the sweetness of something even sweeter, like a Florentine cookie).

Panna cotta or pudding, lumps or not, browned butter or not, I can check another delicious daring bakers challenge off the list.  Thank you Mallory of A Sofa in the Kitchen!

White Chocolate “Panna Cotta” – but actually pudding

Ingredients

• 1 cup whole milk
• 1 cup heavy cream
• 1/4 cup sugar
• 3.5 ounces good quality white chocolate, finely chopped
• 2 tablespoons cornstarch (mixed into 1/4 cup of the milk and set aside)

Preparation

1. Combine all ingredients except for the cornstarch mixture in a medium saucepan over medium-high heat.
2. Heat until the chocolate melts and reduce the heat to medium.
3. Whisk in the cornstarch mixture, whisking constantly until the mixture thickens.
4. Pour pudding into four ramekins or other serving glasses of your choice.
5. Cover and chill overnight.

Florentine Cookies

Ingredients

• 2/3 cup butter
• 2 cups quick oats
• 1 cup granulated sugar
• 2/3 cup all-purpose flour
• 1/4 cup light or dark corn syrup
• 1/4 cup milk
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 1 3/4 cups chocolate chips or 11.5 ounces chopped bittersweet chocolate

Preparation

1. Preheat the oven to 375.  Line two baking sheets.
2. Melt the butter in a medium saucepan over medium heat, continue stirring over medium heat until the butter browns and the milk solids separate (about 10 minutes).
3. Remove from heat and stir in oats, sugar, flour, corn syrup, vanilla extract, and salt.
4. Drop by level teaspoons, about 3 inches apart onto lined baking sheets.
5. Bake 5 to 7 minutes until medium brown.
6. Let cool completely on baking sheets and then transfer to a wire rack to cool.
7. Melt the chocolate in a microwave safe bowl, stopping every 30 seconds or so to stir so that the chocolate doesn’t burn.
8. Spread the chocolate on one cookie half and then sandwich together with another cookie.

Daring Bakers: Stollen

Do you have those lists?  You know, those lists of things you need to bake, dishes you need to cook, books you need to read, movies you need to see, mountains you have to climb?  Well, I do.  And stollen just so happened to be on my “to bake” list.  But how was I ever going to find the opportunity to stollen when the season for it was so elusive?  One moment, your heart is filled with holiday cheer and you are baking for friends and family left and right and above and behind and north west and south east and then before you can even take down the Christmas lights, you’re on a “diet” to cleanse yourself of all those holiday goodies.

Which is precisely why I love Daring Bakers.  Who cares if I barely have the time to make the dough because I’m baking and packaging 200 cookies and 100 caramels for my classmates?  So what if I have a physics test I should study for?  I’ve got to get that stollen done before the dead line or else face disappointment in myself.  And disappointment in myself is worse than getting a bag of coal for christmas.  At least you can use coal as a means for self defense or heat.  Disappointment won’t give you anything at all.  Except for that empty, gnawing hole in your heart that always lets that darn cold draft chill you to the core.

But christmas is a time of cheer and whole, warm hearts, not ones with holes and drafts, so disappointment was not (and never will be) an option.  So I made the stollen.  And here is is.  In all of it’s dried fruit, zesty, doughy, nutty magnificence.  I cut the recipe in half and made half into stollen cinnamon rolls filled with a mixture of butter, brown sugar, toasted almonds, and a drop of almond extract.  I then glazed them wish a powdered sugar glaze (mixed with a tablespoon or so of milk) flavored with another splash of almond extract.  I made the other half into a traditional stollen wreath dusted with powdered sugar.  Thank you Penny from Sweet Sadie’s Baking! If you would like the recipe, check out her blog and have a very happy (disappointment and coal free) holidays!

Daring Bakers: Crostata

I wish I could go an a three paragraph long rant about how delicious this tart was, but unfortunately, I’m cutting it quite close to jumping off the roof of my house.  I’m throwing a cocktail party-themed birthday party tomorrow to celebrate my 17th birthday and I promise to share all the delicious festivities as witnessed through my new camera (which I took the last picture of the crostata with).  I would like to mention that I used local cranberries that I bought back in September from the Boston Local Food Festival and threw in the freezer until I had a great opportunity like this to use them.  I am grateful for modern technology like freezers every single day.  I also used the a blend of all-purpose flour, whole wheat pastry flour, almond meal, and barley flour for the dough.  With a smidgen of almond extract, it made for a perfect base for perfectly tart and orangy cranberry filling I used.

Anywho, if you’d like the recipe for the crostata, check out Simona’s wonderful blog, briciole.

This is the recipe for the cranberry filling:

Ingredients

• 2 1/4 cups cranberries
• 1/4 cups orange juice
• 1/2 cup brown sugar
• 1/2 cup orange marmalade
• pinch of salt

Directions

1. Combine all the ingredients in a medium saucepan and bring to a boil.
2. Then simmer, uncovered, until some berries burst and the mixture thickens a bit (about 5 minutes).
3. Take off the heat and let cool before adding to the crostata.

Daring Bakers Challenge: Donuts

Donuts this good really need to come with a warning label.

WARNING: so unbelievably light and fluffy that you may consume a dangerous amount, an amount that will increase exponentially every time you through your kitchen and spy the irresistible, fried donut-shaped pieces of heaven sitting so innocently on their racks.  May cause severe addiction, paranoia (that someone has been eating your donuts), mood swings (depression when you realize the donuts will be gone at some point, coupled with periods of elation as you wallow in the magnificence of donuts), sugar highs, sugar lows, food comas, and in some cases; extreme satisfaction.

If you want what is best for your health, please heed my warning.  However, if you are more interested in the spiritual enlightenment that is fresh, homemade donuts, please, please with a donut on top, ignore my warning and make these donuts.  And thank you Lori of Butter Me Up.  You have changed my life.  I can now die happy knowing I have eaten at least twenty fresh homemade donuts in one day.  But really, I had no other choice.  They were just so seductively calling to me with their fluffiness and sugary glaze and their yeastiness AND these really should be eaten the day they are made.  Otherwise they start to go stale, just like many relationships after the first date.

 

It was love at first rise. Well, technically this is the second, but you get the point.

Not even hot oil can keep us apart.

Our love was as beautiful as a freshly fried donuts. In fact, our love was a freshly fried donut.

Then bacon came into our relationship and nearly stole my heart away. So I just had to come up with a compromise.

Who said love triangle can't work?

It's hard to say no to a donut hole as adorable as this.

I can't help it. These were so marvelous. I almost just liked the screen and fell in love all over again.

And the donuts lived happily ever after in my stomach and I lived happily ever after forever and ever. The end. Now go make some donuts.

Yeast Doughnuts by the magnificent Alton Brown

Ingredients

• 1 1/2 cups milk
• 2 1/2 ounces vegetable shortening, approximately 1/3 cup – I used butter.
• 2 packages instant yeast
• 1/3 cup warm water (95 to 105 degrees F)
• 2 eggs, beaten
• 1/4 cup sugar
• 1 1/2 teaspoons salt
• 1 teaspoon freshly ground nutmeg
• 23 ounces all-purpose flour, plus more for dusting surface
• Peanut or vegetable oil, for frying (1 to 1/2 gallons, depending on fryer) – I used peanut.

Preparation

1. Place the milk in a medium saucepan and heat over medium heat just until warm enough to melt the shortening. Place the shortening in a bowl and pour warmed milk over. Set aside.
2. In a small bowl, sprinkle the yeast over the warm water and let dissolve for 5 minutes. After 5 minutes, pour the yeast mixture into the large bowl of a stand mixer and add the milk and shortening mixture, first making sure the milk and shortening mixture has cooled to lukewarm. Add the eggs, sugar, salt, nutmeg, and half of the flour. Using the paddle attachment, combine the ingredients on low speed until flour is incorporated and then turn the speed up to medium and beat until well combined. Add the remaining flour, combining on low speed at first, and then increase the speed to medium and beat well. Change to the dough hook attachment of the mixer and beat on medium speed until the dough pulls away from the bowl and becomes smooth, approximately 3 to 4 minutes. Transfer to a well-oiled bowl, cover, and let rise for 1 hour or until doubled in size.
3. On a well-floured surface, roll out dough to 3/8-inch thick. Cut out dough using a 2 1/2-inch doughnut cutter or pastry ring and using a 7/8-inch ring for the center whole. Set on floured baking sheet, cover lightly with a tea towel, and let rise for 30 minutes.
4. Preheat the oil in a deep fryer or Dutch oven to 365 degrees F. Gently place the doughnuts into the oil, 3 to 4 at a time. Cook for 1 minute per side. Transfer to a cooling rack placed in baking pan. Allow to cool for 15 to 20 minutes prior to glazing, if desired.

Donut Glaze

Ingredients

• 1/4 cup whole milk
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 2 cups confectioners’ sugar

Preparation

1. Combine milk and vanilla in a medium saucepan and heat over low heat until warm. Sift confectioners’ sugar into milk mixture. Whisk slowly, until well combined.
2. Remove the glaze from the heat and set over a bowl of warm water.
3. Dip doughnuts into the glaze, 1 at a time, and set on a draining rack placed in a half sheet pan for 5 minutes before serving.

Note: I got lazy and didn’t sift the sugar for either glaze and ended up with some clumps.  If you don’t mind clumps, or are extremely impatient – like me, feel free not to sift, otherwise I highly recommend it.

Chocolate Donut Glaze

Ingredients

• 1/2 cup unsalted butter
• 1/4 cup whole milk, warmed
• 1 tablespoon light corn syrup
• 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
• 4 ounces bittersweet chocolate, chopped
• 2 cups confectioners’ sugar, sifted

Preparation

Combine butter, milk, corn syrup, and vanilla in medium saucepan and heat over medium heat until butter is melted. Decrease the heat to low, add the chocolate, and whisk until melted. Turn off heat, add the powdered sugar, and whisk until smooth. Place the mixture over a bowl of warm water and dip the doughnuts immediately. Allow glaze to set for 30 minutes before serving.