Daring Bakers: Biscuit Joconde Imprime/Entremet

When you look at the title of this blog post you probably had the same thought as me - what the heck is a Biscuit Joconde Imprime/Entremet? Since I am not a pastry chef and I am not French I will just post the definitions given to me.

A joconde imprime (French Baking term) is a decorative design baked into a light sponge cake providing an elegant finish to desserts/torts/entremets/ formed in ring molds.

Entremets (French baking term)- an ornate dessert with many different layers of cake and pastry creams in a mold, usually served cold.

This was probably one of the most stressful desserts I have made. I think part of the reason for that is the lack of direction. All of the daring bakers challenges have a lot of room for you to make creative decisions but this one left it totally open on what you put in it. The second thing that makes it a little stressful is the fact that it is one of those desserts that you have no idea if it came out until you un-mold it in front of your guests.

After seeing some of the other bakers completed challenges I finally decided what I would do. I was going to have a dinner with a few kids so I decided it would be fun to make individual desserts and put everyones initial as part of the design. My three year old is really into seeing the first letter of his name (and was even a little upset that his letter is not being used in this post). I used some 2 1/2 PVC pipe as the mold for the dessert to make kind of a narrow/high dessert.

For fillings I did the following (in order):

1. daquoise - a kind of meringue cookie
2. pomegranate bavarian mixed with a little cream cheese to make a kind of "cheesecake" layer
3. lemon curd lightened with a little whipped cream
4. pomegranate gelee

On the side is one of the daquoise along with some whipped cream, pomegranate reduction, and some pomegranate seeds.

I'm not going to give my recipes since they were kind of improvised and I am not really sure I could reproduce them. If anyone really wants more info on any of the layers let me know and I will do my best. I do have recipes for some of the layers.

I was actually surprised at how good these turned out. I liked all of the layers and the flavors went well with each other. My cake was about 1/4 inch thick - which I think was a little thick for such a small diameter dessert but I still managed to get it to work. The three year old girl who got the "M" dessert in the above picture absolutely loved hers and gobbled up the whole thing. At the end she thanked me for making a dessert with her initial on it. The honesty of children is so nice (when they like it).

Here is the challenge that contains the recipes for the cake along with different ideas for the fillings. Thanks to Astheroshe at accro for this months challenge. Astheroshe graduated from Culinary school as a pastry chef (just for fun) a few years ago and you can definitely tell by looking at her blog - so many good looking desserts.

One other note - I decided to finally join Daring Cooks. Daring Cooks is the sister site to Daring Bakers so it is the same time of thing - just with non-dessert items. So far I have just been doing the baking part. Since Barefoot Bloggers changed their format I have not really participated in that so I decided it was time to try something new. It should be a nice challenge.

Daring Bakers: Christmas Stollen

On the Daring Baker's website there was a lot of discussion about what the December recipe would be this year. It is always something for the Christmas season and a lot of people seem to fear the possibility that someone would pick fruitcake. It turns out there are a lot of fruitcake haters out there. Well this year they did - sort of. They pick stollen. Stollen is a traditional German fruitcake - but it is more of a bread than a cake since it is made with yeast. Traditionally stollen is shaped more like a loaf (supposed to represent the baby Jesus wrapped in swaddling clothes) but we were to make ours in the wreath form you see above.

Well I am not a fruitcake hater. When I grew up my grandmother would make fruitcake every Christmas. I think it was pretty much a traditional southern fruitcake and I still enjoy it when I can get it. I have never made one myself though so I was excited at the thought of making the Stollen this month. The Stollen can be pretty easy to make if you use all store-bought ingredients but I decided to make a few of them.

I have not got out the candy thermometer in a while but I needed it twice for this recipe. The first thing I made was the candied citrus peels. These taste a lot better than anything you would buy and I used this recipe to make them.

The second thing I made was some marzipan. Marzipan is a traditional filling for a stollen and it was something I wanted to experiment with so I decided to make some. My father doesn't like the almonds that are in a traditional marzipan so I decided to experiment and use pecans in place of the almonds. I have never heard of anyone making pecan marzipan but I figured it was worth a try. I used this recipe - http://candy.about.com/od/nougatmarzipancandy/r/Basicmarzipan.htm as a starting point. Instead of grounding the pecans I just processed them in the food processor. I think that left them a little course and it ended up not being quite as much of a paste as a normal marzipan but it worked great in the stollen.

The only other modification I made to the recipe was that I used raisins, blueberries, cherries, and cranberries instead of just raisins and I also used a mix of cherries and pineapple in place of the glace cherries. I also substituted some course chopped pecans for the almonds.

The resulting stollen was fantastic. It looked beautiful in the wreath shape. It is a nice deep brown color and with all the powdered sugar on top it looked and tasted fantastic. I really liked the pecan marzipan - I like almonds but I think the pecans were really good in this. It is a heavy bread but nowhere near as heavy as a traditional fruitcake.

I thought it tasted pretty good but a week or so after I made it I made the discovery that elevates this above a traditional fruitcake for me. Like any fruitcake this is supposed to store well. Like a normal bread it does start to get a little dry after a while. Well many people had posted that it was normal to eat it toasted and normal to put butter on it. Well toasted with butter was incredible - like a good cinnamon raisin toast - only better. I was going to be saving some for Christmas to share with the family but I have finished off half the loaf (the other half went to a pot luck) myself. I still enough of the citrus peels and marzipan for another so I think I will try making a smaller loaf - maybe in the traditional shape so I can bring it to Christmas dinner at my mom's.

Thanks to Penny at Sweet Sadie's Baking for this months challenge. It was good to get everyone to try out a fruitcake - some found they liked it (an some found out they really didn't). Also thanks to Audax at Audax Artifex - He provided a lot of hints and I used recipes he provided for the citrus and marzipan. If you have not checked out his blog - do it - he takes all of the daring kitchen challenges to a whole new level. I think he has made at least 4 completely different stollen for this challenge.

Here is a pdf with the recipe used for the challenge.

Snow Cream

This is a little bit of a departure from most of the posts I do but it it something I have been wanting to do for a long time. The name of the blog is A Cooking Dad and most of the posts focus on the cooking - this one focuses on being a dad (but still a little cooking thrown in).

One good food memory I have from my childhood is snow cream. This is probably

a foreign concept to most of you - I have never heard of anyone else making it. I found three main variations on the Internet. One version is made with eggs, milk, sugar, and snow. The second is sweetened condensed milk and snow. In the third you actually make a custard and mix it with the snow. I don't really know how my grandmother made it. I think she may have actually made a custard and mixed it with the snow. I'll have to try to figure out what the official family recipe is, but for now, I just made the version with the sweetened condensed milk.

Before I describe how it tastes let me say this recipe is more about fun than tasting good. This is not going to taste like Hagen Daz if that is what you are expecting. It is not as creamy as ice cream but the texture is not bad. The taste is pretty much the taste of sweetened condensed milk. In the future I think I will try some of the other version as I think they may taste better - but the project was a success. My son had a ton of fun gathering the snow to make ice cream and it tasted great to him.

Snow Cream

Serves 4

Ingredients

• 1/2 can (7 ounces) sweetened condensed milk
• 1 tsp vanilla
• Snow - I used about 6-8 cups of fresh, light and fluffy snow

Directions

1. Mix the sweetened condensed milk and vanilla.
2. Gather the fresh snow. Pour the condensed milk mixture over the snow and stir until well combined.

Note: Watch out for the yellow snow!

Daring Bakers: Chocolate Crostata

This month for Daring Bakers the challenge was to make a crostata. A crostata is basically just the Italian version of pie. It can be made in a tart pan or made free-form. The filling was up to us but the host showed versions filled with jam and with pastry cream. Well for me either of those sound fantastic - especially the pastry cream version. Problem was the timing meant this would be a perfect dessert to make for my wife's birthday and she has pretty much the opposite taste of me when it comes to dessert.

I decided to compromise. I would attempt to make a chocolate and pastry cream version. I

made half of the pastry cream recipe in the challange and poured it in the bottom and poured some chocolate ganache on the top. I made the crust, ganache, and

pastry cream all with a little bit of orange zest added since I think orange goes well with chocolate. I wasn't really sure how it would work baking the ganache but it turned out incredibly. The chocolate was just the right consistency and the pastry cream helped offset the strong chocolate flavor just enough. My wife and I both loved it.

This months challenge was hosted by Simona at briciole. Simona has an Italian cooking blog ( she is an Italian woman living in California) that looks fantastic. An interesting thing that I have not seen before - her blog posts all include an MP3 of her pronouncing all the Italian words in the blog. Cool idea for people trying to learn Italian or just if you want

to sound better ordering Italian food.

If you want to try your own crostata here is the challange we used with the recipe for the crust and the pastry cream -Daring Bakers' Crostata Challange.