Baked Alaska

I was ever so excited to be accepted into the Daring Bakers community at the end of last month. So excited, in fact, that I turned my very first Daring Challenge into a semi-communal event :)

Alex - guest photographer for this post and fellow Ravenclaw extraordinaire

August's challenge was the option of making either Baked Alaska or petits fours using a brown butter pound cake and homemade icing. My original plan was to make both, however time constraints (working more than forty hours a week!) prevented me from finishing them, so they have been sitting lonely in my freezer for weeks now.

Action shot!

Making the ice cream was easy, especially since I happened to purchase an ice cream machine at the beginning of the summer. Browning the butter seemed daunting but turned out to be easy and smelled delicious. The cake was merely okay, probably not a make again.


My grandpa, who was a pro cook on a convoy ship in WWII, happened to come by at the very moment I was about to make the meringue. Of course I recruited him to help :)

He showed me some tricks of the trade, including chilling the eggs whites, bowl and beaters in the freezer for a few minutes. I had read before that egg whites beat better when at room temperature, but this method seemed to work really well. The meringue was delicious, but unfortunately I ruined the entire dessert by failing to cover all the ice cream, allowing it to melt in the oven!


I'm calling this one a re-do! But this is what learning is all about. Thanks for reading, and dftba!

Sesame Noodles

I'm much more of a baker then a cook, but when I saw these noodles I knew what I was having as a late night snack that night. Such simplicity for such tasty, healthy results.

Ingreeds

I combined the above in a measuring cup with some sugar and hot water, and poured it right over my pasta. I was supposed to use sesame oil as well but I did not have any on hand.

Omg yum.


Garnish with some sesame seeds, both toasted and regular, and it's good to go! I shared with my brother and he thought they were good, too.

Thanks for reading, have a good one, and dftba!

French Macarons

It feels as if I have been admiring French macarons, with all their mini-cookie-sandwhich-adorableness, across the internet for years. It's as if succeeding at this particular dessert is a pre-requisite for any decent food blog. So, when I found almond flour while shopping with my mother at a bulk food store, I knew I had to try making them.

Rainy mornings all week prevented me from putting that almond flour to good use- you can't beat egg whites when it's humid! I was finally able to make them last night after work, but man, that wait was worth it.

I've had the impression that these suckers were very hard to make. Sure, they were rather fussy, with many bowls and steps required, but by following this recipe to the T I was able to procure wholly satisfying results :)

Ingreeds

Other than the almond flour, nothing really out of the ordinary. I had some cherry candy flavouring leftover from when I pulled taffy awhile ago, but it wasn't necessary.

I separated my eggs while they were still cool, then left the whites become room temperature while I prepared everything else. This is because colder eggs separate more neatly, but warm egg whites yield more volume.

Ouu, voluminous.

I made a simple syrup and added it to the beaten whites. Such a lovely gloss! After folding in the dry ingredients, I separated the batter in half to make some pink-tinted cherry macarons, and some golden-tinted vanilla macarons.

Fresh from the oven, arranged by size (because I fail at uniformity haha). Don't they have the cutest little feet? Not perfect, but pretty darn good for a first try, I'd say.

Some assembly required

Check the production line on these cuties. I filled them with a reduced raspberry puree (jam turned out to be too "slippery") and a basic white chocolate ganache.

I'd say that this first attempt was quite the success, especially since my coworkers thought they were yummy too :)

Thanks for reading, have a good one, and dftba!