THE DARING BAKERS’ JUNE, 2013 CHALLENGE: LIFE OF PIE

Thank you so much to Rachael of Pizzarossa for giving us such a wonderful challenge for June's Daring Baker's Challenge. 

I chose to do the Chocolate and Caramel Tart as it was something that I have never done before. I ended up using a pit pan as I do not have a tart pan and could not find one at the stores out here. One of the downfalls of living in a smal town I guess. I will definitely need to order one online since I would love to do more baking using it.   I will admit that the crust was a bit challenging for me. The first go around I used granulated sugar in the crust and I just could not get it to be 'wet' enough to bind together. I tried again the second time with powdered sugar instead and it came out lovely.  The end result of the crust made enough for 2, so I made a double batch of the chocolate mousse and made two 'pies'.   When the recipe gives the options to use powdered sugar in the chocolate mousse, I decided against it as it seemed like it would already be rich enough with the caramel and chocolate.


Download printable file Here

Chocolate and Caramel Tart:

Recipe Source:

Pastry by: chefsimon
Filling by: Valéry Drouet's "Chocolat"

Servings: 8

Active time: 1 hour altogether

Baking time: 35 minutes altogether

Cooling time: approx. 2 hours altogether

Ingredients

Pâte sablée

1 large egg yolk

5 tablespoons (75 ml) (70 gm) (2½ oz) granulated or powdered sugar, as you prefer

1¾ cups (420 ml) (250 gm) (8¾ oz) all-purpose flour

pinch salt

9 tablespoons (1 stick + 1 tablespoon) (125 gm) (4 ½ oz) cold butter, diced

3 tablespoons plus 1 teaspoon (50 ml) cold water

Filling

For the caramel

7 tablespoons (105 ml) (100 gm) (3½ oz) granulated sugar

7 tablespoons (100ml) whole cream, hot

For the chocolate mousse

2 large eggs

7 tablespoons (100ml) whole milk

1/3 cup (80 ml) (75 gm) (2½ oz) powdered sugar (optional)

13 tablespoons (200ml) whole cream

1 cup plus 3 tablespoons (280 ml) (200 gm) (7 oz) dark chocolate, broken into pieces

Directions:

Pâte sablée

1. Preheat oven to moderate 350°F/180°C/gas mark 4. Lightly grease a 9"/24cm or 10"/26cm tart pan, ideally a fluted metal one with a removable bottom.

2. In a small bowl, whisk the egg yolk and sugar together with a teaspoon of the water until pale and fluffy. Set aside.

3. Sift the flour and salt together into a mound on a work surface.

4. Scatter the diced butter over the top of the flour. Quickly toss the butter in the flour so it's all coated, then, using your fingers, rub it in until it resembles breadcrumbs. Keep repeating the operation until it has the consistency of sand.



5. Gather the flour mixture into a mound and make a well in the center.

6. Pour the egg mixture and the rest of the water into the well. Working quickly, incorporate the wet ingredients into the flour, first with your fingertips then with a bench scraper until just mixed but not brought together.



7. Gently gather dough together into a rough ball between your palms. If it stays together, it is sufficiently moist. If it doesn't stay together, add a touch more water and repeat the process.



8. Using the palm of your hand, push away from you to smear the dough across the work surface, gather it up and repeat until it comes together into a smooth, soft ball. You aren't kneading, you are using the smearing action to bind the elements of the dough without developing the gluten in the flour. The dough ball shouldn't spring back when pressed.



9. Lightly flour your work surface and lightly roll the dough out to about 3mm thick in a circle to fit your pan. Press the dough gently into the pan, prick all over the bottom with a fork.

10. Line the tart pan with baking paper and fill with dry beans or pie weights and bake until set, around 9 minutes. Remove pie weights and paper and bake another 6 minutes, until dry.



11. Remove the pastry from the oven and allow to cool in the pan. Leave the oven on.

Filling

For the caramel

1. Spread the sugar evenly across the bottom of a small, heavy-based, non-coated saucepan (it needs to be metallic so you can see the color). Heat over a medium-low heat without stirring until the sugar starts to melt and becomes liquid around the edges. Once about a quarter of it has melted, gently stir continuously with a wooden spoon or heat-proof spatula until it turns a deep amber color, a few minutes depending on how high the heat is.

2. Remove from heat and very slowly and carefully pour all (100ml) of the hot cream into the caramel, stirring continuously - it will splutter and steam so be very careful as it is extremely hot. The cream needs to hot and poured very slowly, otherwise the caramel will seize. Keep stirring until it stops bubbling and is well combined then set aside to cool. I couldn't take a lot of pictures of this process because I needed both my hands!

For the chocolate mousse

1. In a medium bowl, whisk the eggs together with the milk (and powdered sugar, if using).



2. In a small heavy-based saucepan, bring all (200ml) of the cream to a boil.



3. Remove cream from heat and add the broken chocolate. Stir until the chocolate has melted completely and the mixture is smooth. Let cool a few minutes.



4. Pour the chocolate mixture into the egg and milk mixture and stir gently with a spatula to obtain a smooth cream.



5. Spread the cooled caramel in the bottom of the cooked tart shell.



6. Gently pour the chocolate cream over the caramel so you don't disturb it.



7. Place the tart into the hot oven and bake for 30 minutes, until the filling has set but is still wobbly in the center.



10. Remove the tart from the oven and allow to cool to room temperature. If using a tart pan with removable bottom, unmold before serving.



       

              It will keep in the fridge, covered with plastic wrap, for 3 days. It is unsuitable for freezing. The pastry can be made a day ahead.

Additional Information:

Pâte sablée step-by-step pictures (the text is in French but the pictures are great)

http://chefsimon.com/pate-sablee.html


and a video of the pâte sablée process

http://chefsimon.com/videos/pate-sablee.html


David Lebovitz has some great tips and pictures on making caramel here

http://www.davidlebovitz.com/2008/01/how-to-make-the/

National Fresh Veggies Day 2013- Spaghetti Squash

In honor of National Fresh Veggies Day, I figured that we would try some spaghetti squash for the first time. Its really refreshing to eat and doesn't make you feel all weighted down. Even my 5 year old enjoyed this recipe. Simple yet delicious.

Ingredients:

1 spaghetti squash
Cherry Tomatoes
Bacon
Parmesan Cheese (I used a mix of Parmesan, Romano, and Asiago)
Mexican Shredded Cheese
Mozzarella cheese
salt pepper

Directions:

I cut the squash in half lengthwise and put them face down in a baking dish with about an inch of water. After baking this for appx 30-40 minutes, I let them cool slightly and then scooped out the seed section. Using a fork, I then carefully scraped the squash out making it look like spaghetti noodles. I let them drain in a colander while I was preparing the rest of the ingredients.

Lay the spaghetti squash in a small baking dish so its evenly distributed across the bottom. Then sprinkle with salt, pepper, Parmesan cheese mix, and mozzarella cheese. Bake for about 20 minutes or until the squash is cooked through and cheese is melted.





Top with Sliced cherry tomatoes, bacon, and Mexican shredded cheese.

The Daring Cooks June 2013 Challenge - Meatballs Around The World

The Daring Kitchen never fails to give wonderful recipes to work from at making some amazing food and challenge ourselves as cooks. June 2013's challenge for The Daring Cooks was Meatballs Around the World.

We were to either choose a 'wet-prep' method (where the bread is soaked in milk) or the 'dry-prep' method (where you use dry bread crumbs) to make the meatballs.

Thank you so much to Shelley from C Mom Cook and her twin sister Ruth from Mommy-Crafts for giving us such a wonderful challenge this month!

I decided that I would go with the 'wet-prep' method since I have never done it before when making meatballs. Usually Im a 'dry-prep' method kind of girl, but there is ALWAYS room for trying something new.

I chose my recipe for the 'wet-prep' method, based on Mark Bittman’s recipe, as seen from: Seasonally Effective and then added my own twist to finish it off.

Salisbury Steak Meatballs

Ingredients:

2 slices of wheat bread (crusts removed), cut into small pieces
¼ cup milk
2 pounds ground beef (or other meat, or meat combination of your choice)
Salt
Pepper
1 egg
1 large Onion (chopped finely
Handful of Mushrooms (chopped finely)
Strips of bacon (Cut into small pieces)
Garlic EVOO
Steak Seasoning

Directions:

1. Fry up the bacon until crisp., set to the side.

2. Saute the onion and mushroom in the leftover bacon grease until near carmelized, set to the side.

3. Soak the bread in the milk (using only enough milk to soak up the bread), until the milk has been soaked through, draining any excess milk

4. Once the bread has soaked up the milk, add the meat, egg, salt, pepper, bacon, onion and mushroom mix, and steak seasoning and mix it thoroughly with a spoon or your hands (The hands work the best at getting the mixture really worked in).






5. Roll the mixture into uniform sized balls.

6.Fry in a pan with a small amount of EVOO until outside is nice and crisp and inside are cooked through, making sure not to crown the pan.





I served mine with mashed potatoes and a mushroom gravy.





The family absoultely loved it, and that says a lot since my boyfriend is not usually big fans of meatballs.

Co-Worker's Baby Shower Lunch

I generally jump at any opportunity to bake, my work throwing a baby showe lunch for a co-worker of mine wasnt any different. It was requested of me to make cupcakes for this luncheon. I couldnt just leave it at that, I needed to overachieve in order to make it up to myself that I havent been baking as much as I have wanted to lately. My goal was to overachieve and I did just that. I decided that I wanted to make not one, but two different types of cupcakes. I also decided that I wanted to try and make one of those adorable baby in a bassenette, made out of watermelon and cantelope, that I keep seeing all of the internet. And last but not least, I decided to make some apple cinnamon muffins to bring in for breakfast. Yeah I realize that all of this didnt need to be made and brought to work. I also realize that I like to do it and that being an overachiever is okay with me. The first thing that I made was apple cinnamon muffins for everyone's breakfast. They were made with some of my homemade applesauce and the final product came out quite good. I decided that I wanted to make two different kind of chocolate cupcakes. The first is a chocolate butter cake recipe with a chocolate buttercream frosting, topped with homemade carmel and sea salt, and then finished with a chocolate covered expresso bean. The second is a chocolate cupcake made with vegetable oil instead of butter, topped with a Peanut Butter and Reese's Pieces buttercream frosting, finished with a few Reese's Pieces candies. Since my co-workers is going to be having a baby girl, I wanted to incorporate the color pink in these cupcakes somehow. I decided on making a yellow cake and added food coloring to make it a pink color. I then took this now pink-yellow cake and decided to put it in the center of the chocalte cupcakes for a nice pink surprise. I just added a small amount of the chocolate mix to each wrapper, then added a small amount of the pink onto the center of those, then covered the rest with some more chocolate mix. It was so warm in my kitchen, as my home is like most in the Casper area and do ot have A/C installed, that the buttercream frosting wanted to melt faster than I could top them with the additional ingredients. They all still tastes wonderful, just not as appealing looking as I may have liked. One thing that I have seen online is those cute little babies made out of watermelon, cantelope, and misc fruit. I decided that I had to make this as well, as I could not resist. I had never made one before, so I made sure to buy two watermelons just in case I screwed one up. It took a bit longer than I expected to hollow out the watermelon and ended up with an extremely tired arm. Once that was done though, it was smooth sailing form there. When I had purchased my cantelope, I swear I stood there at the grocery store staring and sizing up every single one trying to find the one that would end up making the best baby face. I eventually decided on two different ones and figured that if one didnt work out, then I would have a back-up. I basically just cut the cantelope in half length wise and then skinned it with a pairing knife. All that was left to do was to take a melon ball cutter (not sure if that is the tehnical name for them) and cut out two eyes and a mouth. I then used toothpicks to attach two grapes to make the eyeballs and then used another toothpick to hold the binky in the mouth as it kept wanting to fall right back out. In order to get the baby face to stay up like I wanted, I ended up using bamboo skewers, snapped in half, to heold the head in place. Then it was as easy as filling the inside with mixed fruit. It tooka lot of time and hard work, but it was completely worth it to see how excited everyone was about the treats and seeing their faces happy with the results.

Brownies with Shortcake

I wanted to bake something last night that didn't take too much effort or time. I was looking through one of my cookbook magazines and I found the winner. It's a brownie that has a shortbread cookie on the bottom.

First I made the shortbread cookie with mini chocolate chips. This was pressed down into a pan covered in foil, then baked for 8 minutes. 

Next comes the brownie part. This part was quite simple as well. Just a few ingredients blended together by hand and then put on top of the warm cookie layer, then baked for 40 minutes. I ended up baking mine for an extra 10 minutes since I did a double batch in a different pan than what was called for.

These came out so good and will be devoured quickly.

Pizza Two Ways

Pizza was sounding so good for dinner, but I really am not a fan of the ones that get delivered. So.... I made my own :)

I wanted to do one with a white sauce and one with a red sauce. The white sauce consisted of some homemade ranch, garlic EVOO, and some mined fresh garlic. The red sauce was made with a can of tomato sauce, italian seasoning, minced garlic, and jalapeño white balsamic vinegar. Both came out tasting amazing.

Then came the toppings. I'm a big fan of pizza with a little bit of everything on them. I obviously cooked up some bacon, since nothing is really complete without bacon ;) Onions and mushrooms were chopped up and then caramelized in the bacon grease. I had gotten a bunch of bell peppers from the co-op this past weekend, so I decided to cook up some yellow ones in the remainder Of the bacon grease and garlic EVOO. I also chopped up some salami, pepperoni, and marinated artichoke hearts. The ingredients were diodes between the two pizzas and then topped with blue cheese and an assortment of Tillamook flavored cheeses. 

We had some left over sauce so we decided to make some cheesy bread to dip in them. 

I had every intention of taking an after photo, but the food was basically gone as soon as it came out of the oven. 

This is definitely a recipe worth repeating :)

Treasure Chest Cake

Zachary has always been interested in that cute cartoon on Disney with the Pirates. So it came as no surpirse that when it came time to decide what kind of birthday cake he wanted, he asked for a treasure chest with lots of treasure in it. I had never made a cake like this before, but was definitely up for the challenge. I realize now that the hardest part about it was keeping the lid open without sliding off. I made an extra set of cakes just in case I had some issues, but never ended up needing it. This means more cake for everyone!!! I used some fruit roll snacks to give it a border around the outside of the chest and the addition cake. I found all the gold colored wrapped candy that I could from several stores. The only candy necklaces that I could find were Christmas, so they had a bit different of colors to add to it. Zach's favorite part were the 'diamond' candy rings and the 'gold doubloons'. All in all, I am quite impressed with how it turned out :)

Valentine's 2013

Every year for Valentine's Day the kids have to bring in something for their class party. This year I decided to do something a little bit different. Zachary really wanted airplanes and Kyra really wanted butterflies. So I took to the internet in search of some fun ideas. We then decided on our favorites that I would make. Believe it or not, it was difficult to find pixie sticks to do Kyra's butterflies, so we ended up at Sam's Club getting the giant ones. They were the only ones that I could find in town so we went with it. After what seems like days, I finally had all of the layers cut out for the wings and the hearts that went with. I used glue dots to stick the wings together and attach them to the pixie stick. Then came attaching all of the little hearts and the antennas. Once we were through with those, we just attached a little baggy with each child's name on it and put a standard valentine inside. We knew that Zachary's were going to be something that he could have fun and play with. These little airplanes were the best fit for him. The only things needed for this were sticks of gum, lifesavers, rubberbands, and smarties candies. I just took the ruberband and looped it through the lifesaver, then put a stick of gum in through the loops. Then I put the smarties candies in the center of the lifesavers and gum. It was so simple and ended up really cute. The airplane was put inside of a little baggy with a standard valentine. The kids just loved that that got to customize their valentines this year and I loved being able to put a smile on their face with them. Now we just have to wait and see what is in store for next year....... ;)

National Doughnut Day 2013

Im not sure who decided that there should be a day of the year where we celebrate the doughnut, but they deserve some sort of reward. In honor of this fabulous day, I made some doughnuts of my own. I decided to keep it simple for this go around since I had limited time to get them done. Since I didn't have time for the doughnuts to proof, I was left with making standard cake doughnuts. No worries though, they are just as delicious :)

First things first was getting the dough made......

Once the dough is complete, it needs to rest for about 30 minutes. 

After the resting period, roll out the dough on a lightly floured surface, about 1/4" thick, and use the circle cookie cutter to cut out the doughnuts. Don't forget about cutting out the center holes ;) I went with a little bit of a larger center hole so we would have larger doughnut holes to dry up :) 

Go ahead and stick we in the fryer, they won't take long to cook either. I made a glaze and a chocolate sauce. Of course I couldn't forget the colored sprinkles. 

Garden

I love winter. I do know that most people will not agree with me on that either. I love waking up to see that snow has fallen while I slept. It is one of the most beautiful sites to see. Even though I cannot get enough of winter, I do enjoy the beginnings of spring. A month or so before our last frost I get to pull out all of my gardening stuff. It's so exciting to grow something from start to finish. Getting to play in the dirt is a plus too ;) 

This year, I decided I wanted to do more than just my usual 1-2 of each plant. By the time Im done picking what to plant, I had planted seeds in over 216 starters. I knew that this was a bit overkill, but there are always those few that don't end up making it and I wanted lots of veggies this year. 

The cucumbers and green beans just took off, and within a few days we had them large enough to transplant into bigger pots. It took longer than originally expected for our last frost to arrive, so the plants just kept flourishing in the house using the great light from the dining room window. We even started getting some green beans growing :)

Now that the last frost has come and gone, I began moving the plants outdoors and re-planting some into bigger pots. We also went ahead and planted some potatoes into a couple mineral tubs.

Now we have potatoes, cucumbers, sweet snap peas, bell peppers, jalapeños, green beans, carrots, green onions, radishes, habaneros, pumpkins, and watermelon growing. So excited for them to start producing the goods to be harvested :)

Chocolate Butterfly Cupcakes

Kyra's birthday falls in late June, making it next to impossible to celebrate with he friends since she is always out of state with her dad for the summer. Her class was so sweet an suggested that we being something in the last week of school so she would be able to at least some what celebrate this year. She decided that she wanted to have me make cupcakes with butterflies on them. I have seen so many sites online that have those adorable chocolate butterflies on top of cupcakes. I knew that this is why I would be making an that she would love them. I went ahead and made the cupcakes so that way they could cool for a while. I melted some Raspberry Dark Chocolate Candy melts to make the outline of the wings. I cut pieces of wax paper to put over my wing sketches and got to work piping them out. I decided that I would do some purple ones and some blue ones and that I wanted the inside of the wings to match the frosting on the cupcake. It took a while to get them all piped out and off to the freezer they went to harden.

Once the antenna and wings were hard enough to work with, I put them onto the tips of the cupcakes, using chocolate chips to help support them up.  

I put extra glitter crystals on Kyra's cupcake since she's the birthday girl. Todd also decided that she needed an extra set of wings on there since we had a few left over. 

I had a lot of melted chocolate leftover and Todd decided he wanted to 'sample' them. ;)