Tag Archives: daring bakers challenge

My Paris-Brest pastry had a flat tire

11/27/2014 Nichole 2 Comments

Cream-filled pastries and feats of athleticism go together like peas and carrots, so the history behind November’s Daring Bakers Challenge recipe makes perfect sense.

The Paris–Brest-Paris bicycle race was first run in 1891 and is the oldest open-road bicycle race that’s still being run. It’s held every four years now, and it isn’t open to professionals. It’s 1,200 kilometers from Paris to Brest and back again, and PBP participants have 90 hours to complete the course. An equivalent distance in the U.S. would be from Kansas City to Detroit. That’s a pretty long bike ride.

The Paris-Brest pastry was created in 1910 to commemorate the PBP race. It’s piped into a circle to look like a bicycle tire, and it’s filled with a fluffy praline-flavored pastry cream because… ummm… I guess just because praline pastry cream is delicious.

The Paris-Brest is made with a pâte à choux dough, which I’ve made successfully in the past. It didn’t go so well this time around, though, and I think it’s because I didn’t cook it quite long enough and didn’t get enough air into the dough. My bicycle tires were pretty well flat. I decided to make the pastry cream with cookie butter rather than praline, mainly because I didn’t want to make praline. Poppy — who often prefers a very subtle flavor — thought I should have used less cookie butter, but the rest of the household was pleased with the result. It was a little bit grainy, but it tasted nice.

Since my pastry was more cracker-ring than pastry, I wasn’t able to cut them in half to fill them. Instead, we piled the cookie butter cream into the centers and called it a day.

Continue reading My Paris-Brest pastry had a flat tire →

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The Pioneer Woman’s cinnamon rolls are worth the effort

07/01/2014 Nichole 1 Comment

Last month’s Daring Baker’s Challenge was to make Cinnamon Rolls, which finally gave me an excuse to make the The Pioneer Woman’s Cinnamon Rolls. They’ve been on my radar for literally years. I don’t know why it took me so long to try them, but now that I have? I’m pretty sure they’re what got the Food Network’s attention and launched the Pioneer Woman empire. They’re that good.

I wouldn’t call the recipe difficult, but it does take some time to come together so make sure you have time for rising and resting and rolling before you give these guys a go. Also, there’s a chance that you’re going to make a serious mess. If you enjoy cleaning as much as I do, you might want to tell your loved ones you’ll make them some cinnamon rolls if and only if they’ll clean up after you.

So the first thing I did was

And then I

Finally, I took a bite. And I involuntarily did this:

I’m 100 percent serious. Prepare your hearts, minds and funky sweaters for a Cosby dance.

The recipe calls for baking powder, baking soda and yeast, and it yields a terrifically rich and ridiculously soft cinnamon roll. I only ran into a few problems. The first was that I didn’t have any maple flavoring on hand, so I used vanilla in the icing instead. This turned out to be not-a-problem-at-all; the vanilla + coffee in the icing ended up tasting like a vanilla latte. Which is to say: It was scrumptious.

The other problem was that I’d looked at the recipe and thought, “Oh, that’s far too many cinnamon rolls! I’ll make a half-batch!” That’s how I learned that, in fact, there is no such thing as far too many cinnamon rolls. Even if you aren’t prepared to eat two dozen of them on your own, you’re certain to find friends who will help.

So I made them again.

This time I made a full batch. I put half of the dough in one big pan and sent it along with Rockford on his Father’s Day golf excursion. I split the other half of the dough between two pans — one for the kids and I and the other for my father-in-law. I left the coffee out of the icing on the kids’ pan, because Poppy asked me to, but I made up for that by using coffee almost exclusively in the pan for my father-in-law. All three pans were joyfully received and consumed.

This month the Daring Bakers kept our creativity rolling with cinnamon bun inspired treats. Shelley from C Mom Cook dared us to create our own dough and fill it with any filling we wanted to craft tasty rolled treats, cinnamon not required!

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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.