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.

Sweet Rice Dumplings with Palm Sugar and Coconut

I've always enjoyed the cuisines of Asia, but never really thought of trying to cook any dishes myself until about a year ago, when a few select cookbooks crossed my path and piqued my interest.  I'm not referring to authoritative tomes on the complete cuisine of this or that nation, and thank goodness - the intimidation factor with these sort of books is extremely high!  Instead, the cookbooks I'm talking about are aimed toward the intrepid western chef who, enjoying many of the tastes and flavors from their local Thai or Indian or Indonesian restaurant, decides to take baby steps toward them in their own kitchen as well.  Though perhaps not ultra-authentic, they are certainly more accessible to those who have never tasted tamarind or oyster sauce or even more than a tablespoon of a spice at a time.

For me, this has meant reading Leela's creative Thai recipes at the wonderful blog She Simmers, studying and practicing Pim's Pad Thai for Beginners, following Juanita's pandan leaf experiments with interest, copying pages out of the Wagamama Cookbook and an Indonesian cookbook my friend brought home from Bali, deciding that a ziplock of homemade jiao-tze should be a fixture in my freezer for lazy meals, sourcing Asian ingredients and shops all over Zurich, and exploring many of those new flavors and ingredients through Andrea Nguyen's comprehensive book Asian Dumplings and her matching blog Asian Dumpling Tips.

Most recently I made the recipe for Onde Onde, or Sweet Rice Dumplings with Palm Sugar and Coconut: a soft rice-flour based dough is flavored with pandan leaf, wrapped around a small ball of palm sugar, then briefly boiled and rolled in fresh grated coconut.

I found rich and dark Indonesian palm sugar (called gula djawa) at Thanh Hung.  Though packed into the plastic container, the sugar is moist and fairly easy to loosen with the tip of a knife. It can then be shaped into dense balls with your fingers or a measuring spoon.



Next, long and pointy pandan (also known as screwpine) leaves are washed and chopped up into 1-inch pieces with scissors and then zapped in a mini-chopper with some water to form a thick green mush.  After straining the mush through a paper towel into a bowl, you are left with a fragrant and bitter dark-green liquid which will become the flavoring for the dough.





Mixed with glutinous rice flour, the resulting pale-green dough is only complete once it has gone through the "mother dough" procedure.  A chunk is pinched off, flattened, and boiled for 2 minutes, then cooled and kneaded back into the larger mass of raw dough.  This improves the elasticity and texture and allows it to be shaped around the palm sugar balls without tearing or crumbling.





Each dumpling is dropped in boiling water for 3 minutes and then dredged in grated coconut (I used frozen fresh as the recipe specifies - dried would be too crunchy).



Though Andrea's notes say that the palm sugar should turn hot and liquid in the center of the dumplings, mine only melted partially.  Next time I might try boiling them for a little longer to see if they will "squirt lovely melted palm sugar into your mouth when you bite into it," as she describes.



Though a fair amount of work, these were a special and unusual treat and would be a lovely light dessert to finish off a Southeast Asian meal.   Andrea has requested that bloggers not re-post her recipes without permission, so unfortunately I can't share it with you here, but I can say that if you are at all interested in varied and delicious pan-asian dumplings, both savory and sweet (many are also vegetarian and gluten free, made with tapioca and rice flours), then her book should find its way onto your bookshelf soon!