Category Archives: baking

This was not the Pão de Queijo I sought

05/27/2014 Nichole 5 Comments

I only realized this morning that today was the 27th, which is also known as Daring Bakers Reveal Day. This month’s challenge was a Brazilian cheese roll called pão de queijo. From what I understand, they’re supposed to be light and chewy and reminiscent of a gougère, which I’ve successfully made in the past. So I thought I’d make a batch of pão de queijo this evening to serve with our red beans and rice.

I used the pão de queijo recipe from Our Best Bites, which specifically said that there was no substitute for the tapioca flour for which it called. But because our local grocery store doesn’t have tapioca flour and I am a rebel without a clue, I bought a small box of gluten-free rice flour blend and hoped for the best.

The dough/batter was gluey, just as the recipe had said it would be. My final product, though, was neither light nor chewy nor particularly flavorful. It wouldn’t be fair to say I don’t care for pão de queijo, seeing as how what I made didn’t follow the recipe precisely. I think it is fair to say, though, that rice flour doesn’t do the job when you’re trying to make the dish. I know there are grocery stores around here that sell tapioca flour, so I might give this another shot sometime. This effort, though, was a bust.

baking

The road to Snickers is paved with nougat

03/31/2014 Nichole 2 Comments

The Daring Bakers' Challenge This month’s Daring Bakers’ Challenge was to make nougat, which isn’t something that I’d ever even thought about making before. I’ve never eaten nougat outside of a candy bar. And I figured this was no time to start, so I decided to make a peanut nougat to go inside a homemade Snickers bar.

I spliced my recipe together from a couple of sources. I used the Bon Appetit ‘Snickers’ bar recipe for the base and the nougat, and I followed the How Sweet It Is homemade Snickers recipe for the caramel layer. I ended up just melting a lot of chocolate chips and, after I got tired of dipping the individual bars, pouring them over the top of the nougat and caramel layers. It wasn’t very pretty, but it tasted marvelous.

The homemade Snickers bars took far more effort than the homemade Butterfingers, but I think they tasted better, too. And I should know, because I ate a ton of them.

Homemade Snickers

The March 2014 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Rebecca of BakeNQuilt. She challenged us to learn to make classic nougat and to make it our own with our choice of flavors and add-ins.

baking

In which I use a basting brush to make a cake

01/27/2014 Nichole 3 Comments

The first Daring Bakers Challenge of 2014 was a cake I’d never heard of before, a European confection called a baumkuchen. It has lots and lots and lots of layers, and it’s usually prepared on a spit. Like a rotisserie chicken, but with cake batter instead of fowl. I had a very hard time picturing exactly how that worked until I found a slideshow that shows how baumkuchen is made.

And then last week, Rockford snapped this picture at a department store in Yokohama, Japan:

Rotisserie Cake

It’s called baumukūhen in Japan, and according to Wikipedia it’s one of the country’s most popular pastries:

It was first introduced to Japan by the German Karl Joseph Wilhelm Juchheim. Juchheim was in the Chinese city of Tsingtao during World War I when Britain and Japan laid siege to Tsingtao. He and his wife were then interned at Okinawa. Juchheim started making and selling the traditional confection at a German exhibition in Hiroshima in 1919. After the war, he chose to remain in Japan. Continued success allowed him to move to Yokohama and open a bakery, but its destruction in the 1923 Great Kantō earthquake caused him to move his operations to Kobe, where he stayed until the end of World War II. Some years later, his wife returned to help a Japanese company open a chain of bakeries under the Juchheim name that further helped spread baumkuchen’s popularity in Japan.

Daring Bakers Kitchen The DBK recipe didn’t require a rotisserie for the cake’s prep, which is good because I don’t have one handy. The at-home version calls for painting the batter onto the bottom of the cake pan, broiling it, painting on another layer, ad infinitum.

I followed the baumtorte recipe at GlobalTableAdventure.com pretty closely, but I was missing a few things and had to improvise. I didn’t have quite enough almond paste, so I mixed a quarter cup of Trader Joe’s crunchy cookie butter into the almond paste before I added the butter. I also discovered that I didn’t have enough cornstarch, but I was too far into things to run out for more so I used what I had and compensated with extra flour.

Making the baumkuchen/baumtorte is a laborious process. I thought my arm might fall off while I was folding in the beaten egg whites, and painting on the layers of batter seemed to take forever. I cheated and made the first several layers thicker than they’re supposed to be, which was a bad idea. The cheatery was evident when we sliced into the cake, and the thicker layers were less tender than the others.

All in all, is was a tasty and pretty impressive-looking cake, and I would show you my attempt at it if we hadn’t eaten it all before I remembered that I needed to take a picture. Which speaks to the tastiness, I suppose. I don’t know that I’d make another one, but I’d definitely try a slice if I were ever somewhere where they made the authentic version.

The January 2014 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Francijn of “Koken in de Brouwerij”. She challenged us all to bake layered cakes in the tradition of Baumkuchen (tree cake) and Schichttorte (layered cake).