Daring Slackers!

Oh yay! That time of month again - the Daring Bakers strike again, and the culinary blogosphere is dotted with all manner of adorable frozen cheesecake pops. The pops were this month's challenge, hosted by Deborah, of Taste and Tell, and Elle, of Feeding My Enthusiasms.

I was delighted as I did my usual food-blogs-of-the-world tour yesterday evening, as I had the chance to see some lovely photos and some insanely detailed cheesecake-pop decorations. Alas, this month's challenge wasn't meant to be over here at Red Ramekin, and I didn't get around to participating.

It's not that I didn't want to try the pops, but honestly, all of that chilling, freezing, tempering, beating, dunking and drying - not to mention the FIVE, yes FIVE (5), packages of cream cheese required for the recipe - made me into a Daring Slacker this month. Besides, cheesecake just doesn't really do it for me. I have a sweet tooth to write home about, but I'd rather sink it into something like cookies, brownies, cake, or ice cream than cheesecake. Next month I promise to make something spectacular, though.

In the meantime, I encourage you to check out some of the creations of my fellow Daring Bakers: Jen, as always, serves up the most impressively-photographed pops, with some biting wit on the side. Peabody's pops are so ridiculously cute they should be illegal. And then there's Tartelette, who takes decorating to a whole new level. It's probably better that I sat this one out; there is no way I was taking the time to put rainbow-colored sprinkles and cautious little drizzles on things I wasn't even excited about eating.

That's not to say that I haven't been concocting sweet treats of my own design lately. Jonathan and I made frozen yogurt in the ice cream maker (astonishingly, our first batch of fro yo!) not once, but twice. The first time I used mostly full-fat Fage Greek yogurt, which, in taste and in nutritional profile is shockingly similar to sour cream. Hmmm....all I can say is that those probiotic cultures better be pretty damn healthy...

The second time around, I used non-fat Fage. Still yummy, but not quite as, um, creamy as the first time around. Definitely delicious enough to make again, though, and maybe next time it'll stick around long enough for a photo!

The more interesting dish, though, was my submission to this month's Royal Foodie Joust, another blog event hosted by my totally blog-eriffic e-friend, Jenn (aka the Leftover Queen). The premise of the Foodie Joust is this: each month, last month's winner chooses three ingredients, which have to be used in a creative recipe. Bloggers vote for the most creative/delicious entry. I've been wanting to participate in this event for a while, because I love creating a good recipe now and then, and this month I finally got around to it. The ingredients this month were mango, cardamom, and brown sugar. Um, delicious? Obvio.


I decided on a mango-sticky rice variant, and created a bruleed, cardamom-scented brown sticky rice with fresh mango slices. I wanted to keep the mango fresh, because we've been lucky enough to find some unbelievably delicious Mexican mangoes at Whole Foods recently. I've also been itching to try sweet brown sticky rice, which seems to be nutritionally indistinguishable from regular old brown rice, but is much more delicate and ever-so-slightly sweet.

Some friends came over on Thursday night, and mercifully helped us to devour the yogurt and the mango-rice number. Some nuked and juicy frozen blueberries were the perfect complement both to the yogurt and the mango sticky rice.


A real recipe isn't necessary for the mango sticky rice, but here is a brief description of how to recreate it: Prepare sweet brown sticky rice in a rice cooker, using a 2:1 water:rice ratio. Add about 6 green cardamom pods to the rice and water before cooking. Once cooked, allow to cool. Place about 1/4 c. cooked rice in each well of a muffin tin, and sprinkle tops generously with brown sugar. Place under the broiler until caramelized and bubbly (this happens quickly!). Allow to cool, then remove each rice patty to a plate. Top with freshly sliced mango and your choice of other toppings: whipped cream, yogurt, ice cream, thawed frozen blueberries, etc.


I loved the combination of the spiced rice and juicy mango, and have since realized that this "dessert" is actually much healthier than the typical American breakfast. The only added sugar is the sprinkling of brown sugar on the rice, and it includes both whole grains and fresh fruit. Get where I'm going with this one? Serve it for dessert, or brunch, or breakfast...in any case, it is definitely worth a try. The cooked rice also keeps pretty well, so make some the day before you plan to serve the dessert to save yourself some prep time. Hey, I may be a Daring Slacker, but nobody who ate this was complaining.

Daring Bakers Challenge: Dorie's Perfect Party Cake, San Francisco Style

Remember the epic French bread post? And all of those amazing Daring Bakers? Well this month's challenge has now come and gone, and I managed to pull it off at the last minute, during our trip to California.

The recipe this time was decidedly less involved, and allowed for plenty of adaptations and creativity: Dorie Greenspan's Perfect Party Cake. The host of this month's challenge was Morven, whose blog can be found here.

I won't include the entire recipe here, but you should invest in Dorie Greenspan's Baking: From My Home to Yours if you are curious. The original recipe is for a lemon-flavored white layer cake, complete with raspberry filling and a thick, luscious buttercream meringue frosting. We're talking 3-sticks-of-butter-luscious. While this may sound tempting, though, buttercream isn't really my thing....and neither is lemon-flavored cake, for that matter. I knew after reading the recipe a few weeks ago that I wanted to get the creative juices flowing, and make something a bit more in tune with my tastes.

Given that we were in the Bay Area for the past week, we made multiple trips to the Ferry Building Farmers' Market, in San Francisco. Trust me, this is really a farmer's farmers' market, and features heaps upon heaps of fresh vegetables, juicy citrus, and handmade breads, cheeses, and jams. We got up early yesterday morning after a 2-day romp in Big Sur to head on over, hoping to find some baking inspiration from the dizzying array of delicious foodstuffs.

We stumbled upon success at the second stand that we passed, which featured handmade quark. Quark is a mascarpone-like soft cheese, and this particular vendor sold it in a variety of flavors, including the utterly delicious vanilla bean. We tried a sample and promptly bought it, with visions of it oozing from between layers of soft, white cake.

A while later we happened upon a sample-happy vendor selling almond brittle which, crunchy with butter and sugar, made an obvious choice for our cake. And so, with quark and brittle in hand, and a jar of raspberry Bonne Maman in the fridge at home, I was ready to go on a baking binge.

I stayed true to the cake recipe, although I replaced the lemon extract with vanilla, and baked it in a sheet pan instead of in layers. I opted for a mini cake sandwich instead of a big layer cake; I wasn't sure if I could stretch the quark far enough to frost a whole cake. Besides, I can't resist making miniatures.

Once baked, I cut a small circle of cake, and sliced this circle in half to form two layers. I then spread each layer with thinned raspberry jam. Next came a hefty dollop of quark whipped cream, which I made by (surprise!) whipping the vanilla bean quark with some heavy cream to get a smooth, spreadable consistency.

To really push it over the edge, I crumbled up the almond brittle and tossed in a few Scharffen Berger cacao nibs (obtained during a prior Ferry Building visit), and then sprinkled this mixture over the cream.

Then a bit more cream, the final cake layer....

A touch more jam, and voila! A nutty, nibby, berry-y, creamy cake sandwich.

Take a look at this cross-section and tell me this doesn't look good:

Jonathan certainly enjoyed it, as did I. And in case you were wondering: no, I did not have the patience nor the time to make a whole bunch of these little creations. I cut the rest of the cake into cubes, whipped the rest of the cream and quark, and made a trifle which we gobbled up for dessert later that evening. It was heavenly.

So, another challenge down, and I'm anxious to see what next month's challenge is. Thanks to Morven for giving us a little wiggle room in this challenge; I had so much fun picking out flavors and ingredients to make this cake.

And now that I'm back from spring break, stay tuned for more adventures with cacao nibs...

1st Daring Bakers Challenge: Baking (and kneading, waiting, deflating, shaping, proofing, and slashing) with Julia

The moment you have all been waiting for: Red Ramekin's first foray into the exciting and borderline cultish world of the Daring Bakers. "The Daring Bakers?" you ask. "Wow, you must know basically nothing about the culino-blogosphere," I chortle, possessed and covered in flour. It's OK, though, I'll explain anyway. The Daring Bakers is a baking group composed of lots and lots of food bloggers from all over the world. Each month, an illustrious blogger or two "hosts" the event, which means that they pick a challenging baking recipe, disseminate it to the eager and less-illustrious members of the group, and then try and moderate the endless discussions that go on throughout the month surrounding the specifics of the recipe. This often includes topics such as the percentage of gluten in bread flour, the appropriate proofing time for bakers living in Malaysian huts with no air-conditioning, and whether it is acceptable to use a linen towel for covering your dough, even though the recipe explicitly says canvas. It's awesome. No, seriously, the Daring Bakers, and the Daring Bakers blog, are really awesome.

The recipe is released to the group members on the 1st of each month, and must be kept a secret until the last day of the month, when all of the bloggers get to post about their successes and/or failures in making the chosen recipe. The event is not a competition, but rather a way for the blog-obsessed to branch out and try recipes that they might not choose to try otherwise. There's more information, and a complete list of members, at the Daring Bakers blogroll.

So, this month's challenge was.....Julia Child's French Bread. Compared to some of the previous challenges (strawberry mirror cake, lemon meringue pic, sticky buns, buche de noel) this one seemed a bit ordinary. However, most ordinary recipes don't require 12 hours to complete. Ordinary recipes don't require that you set your resting dough on a heating pad to achieve the desired rising temperature. Ordinary recipes aren't 8 pages long. You get the idea. It may be bread, but let's face it: bread-baking is anything but easy. Besides, it's a Julia Child recipe, which makes it extra-special. I (like everyone else who has ever cooked) grew up on Julia Child. OK, I'm exaggerating a bit, but Baking with Julia, on PBS's How-To Saturdays, was the best show. Ever. At that age (maybe 12 or so) when watching TV for an entire Saturday was still a reasonable undertaking, I watched Julia religiously.

I have been pretty busy with work this month, but I didn't want to delay membership in the Daring Bakers another month. So, last Sunday was dedicated to Julia's French bread. We prayed for success on the first try, because there probably wasn't going to be a second try. And nobody likes blogging about failed French bread. Luckily, all went according to plan. We ended up with 3 lovely, uber-French batards with golden, crispy crusts and feather-light interiors.

I will spare you the entire recipe, because it is basically the longest recipe I've ever read and I don't even want to think about typing it up. If you are curious, though, check it out here. I'll lay out the basics, though.

First was the mixing, and then the kneading. Lots of kneading:


Then the dough rose until tripled in size, at which point we deflated the dough and set it to rise again. After the second rise came the shaping:


And then another rise:


And then the baking, which involved, among other things, a silicone pastry brush, two baking sheets, a pizza peel, a baking stone, a cast-iron skillet, lots of floury towels, and 10 ice cubes. Look!


Since this was a rather momentous event in my life as a food blogger, I have taken some time to seriously (and not so seriously) reflect on the whole experience.

Overall, it was wonderful. I've been really into bread-baking lately, and this was a kind of baking that I haven't done so much of. It's a totally classic recipe, and it's one of the staples of any decent baker's bread repertoire. I am pretty obsessed with creating my own recipes and using lots of whole grains and alternative ingredients, but it was fun to have an excuse to go completely balls-to-the-wall refined flour for a change.

We have also been doing a lot of that new-fangled no-knead stuff lately. I must admit that I love the no-knead method. It takes literally 5 minutes to mix the dough, and then you just let it hang out for a while in your fridge until you get your lazy ass around to baking it. That's what I'm talking about.

Still, though, there is something about doing bread the real way - I'm talking about kneading now - that is utterly satisfying. This dough was so great to work with, and it was very nice to actually make a successful kneaded loaf. I've tried doing kneaded loaves in the past - just a few times - and have never really been successful. I discovered that it's because I never really knew how to actually knead dough. This recipe explained it very thoroughly. Turns out when a recipe says "10 minutes" it actually, literally means 10 minutes. My arms were tired. When I was kneading the French bread dough, I could see and feel the dough transform from a mish-mash of gluten and liquid into a smooth, soft, cohesive bread-to-be.


The dough was also amazing in the strictly tactile sense. I'd really been missing out by not kneading dough. After a few minutes, this lovely, white, little lump was so soft and smooth that it almost melted (not really, but it felt like that) into my hands. It wasn't sticky, but just barely tacky; it cleared the surface and became delightfully springy and elastic. By the time I was done pounding that sucker, it was like a refined little bubble of yeasty velvet. If my fingers could talk, they would have said something like: "aaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhoooooooooeeeeeeahhhhhooohh." Oh yeah, it was that good.

The evidence for that was in the rising: our precocious little dough-ball puffed up to triple its volume in less than 2 hours. You don't see that with whole-wheat dough. Trust me. The risings went smoothly, so that was good, if not overly exciting. I went to yoga class during the second rise, though, which was a little bit exciting.

And then there was the shaping. This part scared me the most, since I've never had to shape my free-form loaves into "batards" before. The directions were thorough, although not altogether clear; it was hard to visualize them without actually having the dough in front of me. When the time came, though, the directions pulled through. I won't claim that the loaves were perfectly shaped, but they were at worst a rough approximation of a traditional French bread shape. Long, thin, and not horribly disfigured.

Baking was also a breeze, although it required brushing the loaves with water every 3 minutes for the first 9 or so minutes of baking. Hey, I told you this wasn't easy. Miraculously, though, everything seemed to work more or less as written. After letting the loaves cool for a ridiculously long time, we sliced into one and were pleased with both taste and texture. The crust was crispy with a slight chew, and the crumb was close and fine but light as a feather and subtly yeasty.


So, the real test: is it something I'd make again? Well, to be honest, probably not. For one, this loaf requires 100% white flour. Substituting whole grains here would not be pretty. Nor would it be tasty. While I make some exceptions to my whole-grain regime, when I bake for myself I try to stay away from white flour.

And then, of course, there is the time commitment issue. I do like making bread, and I'm excited to try some more kneaded loaves, but this recipe is a bit over-the-top, time-wise. Three rises, really attentive baking, fairly involved shaping....it all adds up to an entire day dedicated to bread. Not that I don't like the occasional day-dedicated-to-bread. But still. This recipe isn't messing around.

The final kicker? Yeah, our French bread was good. But it wasn't any better than a loaf you could get in any bakery or (gasp!) supermarket. Yep, I said it. Store-bought loaves won't make your kitchen smell wonderful, but seriously, they will save you 11 hours of your precious time. Even if your time isn't that precious, that's still a freaking lot of time. I refuse to use this argument when talking about a) breads that don't take huge amounts of time or b) breads that are in some way unique and can't be replaced with store-bought loaves (there are many). But French bread? It's pretty much everywhere, and baking it is definitely not my comparative advantage (just ask Jonathan, the resident economist, what that means). Oh, I almost forgot: sourdough is better than French bread. If I try to do a traditional white loaf again, you can bet that some serious sourdough starter will be involved. Snap.

So, that's the wrap-up of my first-ever Daring Bakers challenge. Totally worth it, totally enjoyable, and totally educational. I can't wait for the next one (I find out tomorrow, but you have to wait until the end of the month!).

Also, if you actually read this entire post, you can officially consider yourself a food blog geek. You're basically a step away from joining the Daring Bakers yourself. But look at what lies ahead: