Daring Bakers in August: Brown-Butter Peach Petit Fours

The August 2010 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Elissa of 17 and Baking. For the first time, The Daring Bakers partnered with Sugar High Fridays for a co-event and Elissa was the gracious hostess of both. Using the theme of beurre noisette, or browned butter, Elissa chose to challenge Daring Bakers to make a pound cake to be used in either a Baked Alaska or in Ice Cream Petit Fours. The sources for Elissa’s challenge were Gourmet magazine and David Lebovitz’s The Perfect Scoop.



As you can see, I chose to make the petit fours, and filled them with a homemade peach ice cream. When I saw this month's recipe called for cake flour, I thought, "perfect!"  I wrote a few months ago about the challenges of finding cake flour in Europe, and I've long been wanting to test a batch of Swiss-made Kate Flour against commercial cake flour to see how it measures up... pun fully intended.  I brought a package each of King Arthur Flour's Queen Guinevere Cake Flour (bleached - 7% protein) and Unbleached Cake Flour (9.4% protein) back from my recent trip to the States and made three half batches of the brown butter pound cake, each with a different kind of flour.



Any guesses as to which cake is which?  In front is the Kate Flour, followed by Unbleached Cake Flour, and then Queen Guinevere Cake Flour at the back.  They don't look all that different from one another, do they?  I couldn't decide if I was happy with those results or not. On one hand I was hoping for more pronounced differences in the texture of the crumb so that I could learn about and describe the precise characteristics of each type of flour. On the other hand, they are all forms of cake flour, so it makes sense that they turned out similarly, I suppose.  The one thing I did notice was that the batch made with Kate Flour had many good-sized surface air bubbles - not noticeable in the picture above, but you'll have to take my word for it.

Because I only made a half batch of each pound cake recipe, the resulting layer was quite thin (I cut the square of pound cake in half and stacked the rectangles to create the double layers above).  Perhaps any textural difference would be more noticeable in a thicker cake? I'm not sure.

In the end I was rather underwhelmed by the results.  Browning the butter before it goes in the batter creates a tasty and nutty cake that smells heavenly coming out of the oven, but freezing it (and all the butter in it) mutes that lovely flavor quite substantially.  I also found the chocolate-coating procedure to be quite difficult since my cake-and-ice-cream layers kept falling apart in the glaze. Plus, the tepid glaze caused the surface of the ice cream filling to melt and the chocolate to slide off...what a messy business! Matt kept laughing at me with chocolate all over the kitchen and my face.   As I arranged the cakes and set up my camera, the gloomy day's light was quickly fading and so I only have one halfway decent shot to show you this time around.  Despite my feelings about the cakes themselves, the fun of using brown butter and the experiment of trying the different flours made this month's challenge a worthwhile one.

You can find a printable version of the halved pound cake recipe here.