CAKE, COUTURE & CIE

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.

A croquembouche is the dessert traditionally served at French wedding receptions. We had planned to serve a croquembouche along with the classic American tiered cake at our wedding, but unfortunately the bakery was unreliable and pulled out at the last minute. We were pretty upset, since this was one of the ways we tried to incorporate French tradition into our wedding, which took place in the US. Though I must say that this is one tradition that is not always kept over here -- out of all of the weddings we've attended, a croquembouche was served at only one of them. Normally there is an elaborate cake, or several smaller ones. A wedding we attended earlier this month featured this amazing dessert bar: tiny pastries (tarte tatins, opéras, fruit tarts, etc.), mini crème brulées and mousses au chocolat, ice cream, macarons, fruit salad, and small crepes and waffle "popsicles" with every topping you can think of: chocolate, caramel, diced and pureed fruit, raw sugar...I'm getting off track, back to the croquembouche.

Though this dessert seems daunting, it is actually quite manageable when you break it into its component parts: cream puffs, pastry cream and glaze. First off, the cream puffs are easier to make than you might think. Though the recipe provided for the challenge worked well, my go-to recipe for cream puffs is from Dorie Greenspan -- see this blog posting. I've made the savory version for gougères to go with before-dinner drinks and used the basic cream puffs to make profiteroles for dessert. They always turn out perfectly and go over really well.

The pastry cream can be made in no time at all, but the glaze is a different story. I found this to be the most difficult recipe to get right, and it took me four tries and a sugar burn before I was able to achieve the appropriate texture / color. Unfortunately, the sugar hardened too quickly (you have to cool it down in an ice-water bath to stop the sugar from cooking any further, but I found that this is what led to the hardening) and would have taken several more batches to cover my modest croquembouche. This explains why I've posted only the "before glaze" photo above -- what I managed to glaze was just too sad to show. But I did manage to make this cute little bow from an overcooked batch: 

As for decoration, I decided to leave my croquembouche plain since I think they are prettiest without the Jordan almonds, dragées, ribbons, fake birds (yes, fake birds!) that you can sometimes find on them. With fantasies of an enourmous chouquette mountain floating in my head, I was tempted to sprinkle on some pearl sugar before the glaze hardened, but I decided that would be sugar overkill and left it at is.

And it's round #2 for me as a Daring Baker. And here are the obligatory "blog-checking lines" so they can verify that I've followed the challenge:

The November 2009 Daring Bakers Challenge was chosen and hosted by Lisa Michele of Parsley, Sage, Desserts and Line Drives. She chose the Italian Pastry, Cannolo (Cannoli is plural), using the cookbooks Lidia’s Italian-American Kitchen by Lidia Matticchio Bastianich and The Sopranos Family Cookbook by Allen Rucker; recipes by Michelle Scicolone, as ingredient/direction guides. She added her own modifications/changes, so the recipe is not 100% verbatim from either book.

This was my first time ever making cannoli, or any deep-fried dessert for that matter. When visiting some friends in New Orleans a few years ago, I picked up a box of beignet mix with the best of intentions but never quite got around to making them. Although I thought the frying step of the recipe would be the most daunting part, in reality it went smoothly and with no major problems encountered -- no splattering, no burns.

The trickiest part of the recipe was getting the dough rolled out thin enough and then getting it to stay that way. Above you can see the little cannoli soldiers all lined up and ready to go, waiting for the oil to heat up. Well, after frying the first one, it was clear that they weren't thin enough. I had to re-roll each of them until I reached a thickness that wouldn't cause them to open up (you can see the steady progress below). Cannoli are supposed to have a "blistered" appearance, and I'm afraid mine weren't rolled thin enough for this to happen.

As for the final product, I can only vouch for the shells as anyone who knows me knows I steer clear of anything too creamy. The dough contained wine, chocolate and cinnamon, and I found that the shells not only tasted good, but also smelled quite nice when I was rolling them out. After they had cooled, I had fun dipping them in chocolate and sprinkles and filling them with mascarpone.

In September I decided to join the "Daring Bakers" subset of the Daring Kitchen. Members agree to make a recipe ("challenge") each month and blog about it afterwards on the reveal date, which is always the 27th for the Daring Bakers. The 2009 October Daring Bakers' challenge was brought to us by Ami S. of the Baking Without Fear blog. She chose macarons from Claudia Fleming's The Last Course: The Desserts from the Gramercy Tavern as the challenge recipe.

Living in France, it's hard to avoid macarons (not that you would want to!). Among the most well-known créateurs de macarons are Ladurée and Pierre Hermé, but you can also find them at your local corner bakery or boxed and frozen at the supermarket. On most days, I can even buy some at the café on the ground floor of the building where I work.

I was actually thrilled when I discovered this month's challenge recipe. I'd been wanting to try my hand at making macarons for a long time but just never got around to it. I ended up making two batches. I split the first batch in two and tinted the batter with food coloring paste (orange and brown in an attempt to mimic Fall's colors -- in reality they turned out more peach and beige, yet pretty nonetheless). For the second batch, I skipped the coloring and mixed in finely ground espresso beans. I filled both with a chocolate-espresso ganache.

Anyone who has tried to make macarons knows that they are tricky. And as you can see from the pictures, these macarons didn't quite turn out as they should have. I'm still not quite sure what went wrong. I measured the ingredients precisely and followed the recipe to a T. I let the piped macarons rest before putting them into the oven (check out the picture below of the macarons getting their requisite 30 minutes of R&R). I baked them in two stages, at two different temperatures. Despite all of this, these macarons never developed "feet" and the outer part of the shells are porous when they should have been smooth.

Despite their looks, these macarons still tasted pretty good. Though it's easy to get discouraged when a recipe doesn't turn out as expected, I know that it is just a matter of tweaking, experimenting and, especially, patience before I find a version of the recipe that works. This won't be my last venture into the treacherous terrain of macaron baking.