Daring Bakers August 2010 Challenge: Baked Alaska

I'm a Daring Baker, Woohoo!!

I've been looking forward to this for what seems like a really looooong time! I've been reading and following the Daring Bakers/Kitchen for a while. I'm glad I finally made the effort and got rid of all the doubts of whether I should join to become a Daring Baker and whether I would be able to meet the deadlines, making the time to post it etcetera etcetera!! I mean.... I'm a baking addict anyway so why not learn something new every month?! And this challenge did indeed teach me something new :-)

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”.

I was very excited about the challenge and admittedly, a tad bit nervous about pulling it off. There was so much to decide... I realised then, the thought process would take much longer than the actual making!

First off, I decided to go for the Baked Alaska over the Petit Fours. They are both such pretty edibles, it's hard to decide. After much nail-biting, I finally decided. The blowtorching of the baked alaska won me over :-)

Next up, I had to decide on a flavour for the ice-cream. I narrowed the choices down to three: Strawberry Ripple, Mocha Choc Chip and Cookies n Cream. With all my nieces and nephews together at my parent's house, the majority vote was for Cookies n Cream Ice-cream! I wasn't complaining, it's one of my favourite flavours, Mmmm... 

I went for the recommended recipe by David Lebovitz for the ice-cream and added a generous of fine and chunks of oreo cookies into the ice-cream machine at the end.

The next stage was the best bit for me - the browned butter pound cake. Once I had made the 'beurre noisette' (brown butter), I could not believe that I had never made this before! How comes people had kept this secret from me all this time??!! Seriously, at that precise moment it did feel like it was the world's best kept secret and I had missed out all that time. I'm sure everyone in the house felt that too, with the strong nutty aroma wafting through the house. I decided to make mini alaskas, so I made the brown butter cake in a muffin case with only 2cm batter in each to form discs of cake.

The aroma of the brown butter was amazing. But the actual brown butter cake straight from the oven...? Boy oh boy, now that was AMAZING! I could've have all the mini cakes like that, my heart was telling me to eat them while they were hot but my waistline was just not agreeing!! I must make them into baked alaskas and share them amongst my family - that's what my waistline was telling me :-(

You can find all the recipes for this months challenge at Elissa’s site. Thank you Elissa for hosting such a lovely dessert xx

I was very happy with the end result and all in all, my first challenge was a success. Looking forward to the next one now!

PS. Can't believe I was a few hours late posting, I did try very hard to get in done but too much on and not enough hours in the day/night!