(The April 2011 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Evelyne of the blog Cheap Ethnic Eatz. Evelyne chose to challenge everyone to make a maple mousse in an edible container. Prizes are being awarded to the most creative edible container and filling, so vote on your favorite from April 27th to May 27th at http://thedaringkitchen.com!)

I love mousse.  If I see chocolate mousse on a dessert menu, it’s almost always what I choose.  And I like maple syrup, so I fully expected to like maple mousse.

The mousse was only half of the challenge, though.  The other half was edible bowls.  There were a few choices, but I didn’t really want to make bacon cups, so I made mine from nuts.  They’re very simple – just finely diced walnuts, an egg, and a bit of sugar, pressed into tiny bowls lined with aluminum foil.  In retrospect, greasing the inside of the foil would have been a good idea, but I didn’t think about it at the time.

Bake the bowls at 350F for 15 minutes or so until the nuts are toasty. 

I looked at them when they came out of the oven, and I wasn’t sure they were going to hold together.  I was afraid to try to unmold one, so I coated the inside of the bowls with a layer of dark chocolate, hoping it would add more stability.

It turned out they were quite solid – you could easily pick them up, even full of mousse, so I shouldn’t have worried.  But the chocolate was good anyway.

On to the mousse!  This was more complicated.  It started with blooming unflavored gelatin in heavy cream.  Then, I brought a cup of maple syrup to a boil, and very carefully and slowly dribbled it into 4 beaten egg yolks.

Then the recipe said, "Whisk occasionally for approximately an hour or until the mixture has the consistency of an unbeaten raw egg white."  I wasn’t sure the gelatin would set up on the counter to thicken it, and I wasn’t sure how occasionally to whisk – once every 5 minutes?  A few times over the hour?  So I left it on the counter while I made dinner, whisking it when I thought about it.

And in about 45 minutes, sure enough, it was exactly the consistency of a good, fresh, unbeaten egg white.  I was genuinely surprised, and I’m still not sure I understand how it worked.  But it did. 

After that, it was just a matter of whipping some cream, and carefully folding in the maple mixture.  I put it in the fridge to chill for an hour. While it was chilling, I gingerly unmolded the cups.  They were a bit stuck to the foil, but not bad, and I shouldn’t have worried about the strength – they were solid.

When the mousse was chilled, I piped it into the cups and sprinkled a few more nuts on top.

They came out gorgeous.  They would have made a great dinner party dessert – except that I didn’t like the mousse.  The maple flavor was way too strong, and I thought it was almost cloying.  On the other hand, I loved the process, and I may do them again, with a different recipe – say, a good peanut butter mousse, with a peanut cup with the chocolate layer? 

As always, a fun challenge!

( see the recipe )

I’m not a huge hazelnut fan, so I’m not a huge Nutella fan either.  But Mike is, and so when I saw a recipe from David Lebovitz on making your own, I decided I had to try.

It’s an interesting recipe.  As written, it calls for hazelnuts and almonds, some milk and milk powder, a bit of honey, and two kinds of chocolate.  For the first batch, I made it exactly as the recipe suggested. 

Start by roasting the nuts.  Remember to keep a close eye on them – by the time they start to smell roasted, they’re probably starting to burn.  You can do them in the oven, and time them carefully, but I’ve also had good luck toasting nuts in a cast iron pan on the stovetop.

Once they’re toasted, knock off any of the skin that comes off easily.  The recipe suggests rolling them in a tea towel, but I didn’t have much luck getting that to work.  I just rubbed them between my fingers and got most of the skins off.

Toss them in the food processor:

And grind them up as fine as your food processor will grind them.  I ran mine until it started to heat up, let it cool down, and ran it again.  I never did get it incredibly fine, but I have an old food processor. 

Chop up the chocolate, and melt it. I used the microwave, 30 seconds at a time.  I actually own a double-boiler, but I couldn’t tell you the last time I used it.  Microwaves are so perfect for melting chocolate.

Add the melted chocolate to the nut mixture and pulse to combine. 

Mix up the milk, the milk powder, and the honey, and warm it to a boil in a saucepan.  I couldn’t find whole milk powder, so I just used the nonfat milk powder I had in the pantry.  Add the warm milk to the food processor, and run it until everything is combined. 

I poured it into jars because it looks pretty.  I didn’t attempt to seal them or anything, I just put lids on them and put them in the fridge.

So that’s the recipe as written.  What seems more interesting is all the things you could do with the basic recipe.  If you don’t like hazelnuts, it would be fantastic with peanuts or cashews.  You could make it darker with a greater percentage of dark chocolate, or lighter with less.  I think as long as you stick to 1 2/3 cups nuts and around 11 or 12 ounces of chocolate, it should work fine with any nut and any chocolate.  You could even do a white version with macadamia nuts and a white chocolate.  Then you could swirl it with a darker version…

The perfect recipes are the ones that give you a framework and then step back and give you space to make your own.

( see the recipe )

(The February 2011 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Mallory from A Sofa in the Kitchen. She chose to challenge everyone to make Panna Cotta from a Giada De Laurentiis recipe and Nestle Florentine Cookies.)

Another fun challenge!  Panna Cotta has been on my list of things to try for a while, so I was excited about making it.  I decided on the vanilla option, with peach gelée on top.

The panna cotta comes together easily – it’s not as complicated and finicky as a custard or pudding.  You start by adding some unflavored gelatin to a cup of milk.  Let it bloom for a few minutes, then warm it up on the stove.  The goal is to get it hot but not boiling – you’re effectively scalding it to break down the proteins a bit and make it thicken up better.  Once it’s hot, add heavy cream, honey, and a bit of sugar.  I also added in some vanilla bean paste, but the vanilla bean particles didn’t stay suspended very well – I’d skip this next time.

After it all warms up again, let it cool, pour into dishes, and let it cool overnight.  Mine came out a bit puckered on top, but set up nicely:

I wanted something to put on top, and I had some frozen peaches sitting around.  I went looking for a gelée recipe, and didn’t find anything I liked.  I started with an idea from myRecipes and used it as a springboard.  I tossed the (thawed) peaches in the blender to puree them while I bloomed another package of unflavored gelatin in a cup of club soda.  I added half a cup of the peach puree and a box of peach jello, then a cup of boiling water to dissolve it all.  I tried pouring the hot jello on top, but it broke up the panna cotta.  Spooning it carefully on top worked much better.

Next came the cookies.  This was a really quick and easy cookie recipe – add oats, flout, sugar, dark corn syrup (I didn’t have any, so I used half molasses and half light corn syrup), milk, and vanilla to a mixing bowl, melt some butter, and mix it all.  The result is a rather wet and sticky dough, which flattens out very thin when you bake it.

When I went to put the milk back in the fridge after making the cookies, I tipped over one of my panna cotta bowls, and it fell out of the fridge:

Luckily, the mess took less time to clean up then the cookies took to bake.  The recipe said to let the cookies cool completely, then stick pairs of them together with melted dark chocolate.  I did that, but the cookies were far better warm, just as they were, right out of the oven.  The insides were gooey, the outside was crunchy, and they were rich and oat-y. 

In the end, it all came together well.  The peach gelée worked well to add some fruitiness. The panna cotta was rich and creamy, and the cookies were crunchy.  I’m looking forward to making it again, with some different flavors – chocolate panna cotta, maybe, with cherry gelée on top?

( see the recipe )

A couple weeks ago one of my coworkers gifted me with a very large bag of grapefruits off her tree.  I also happened to have nearly a dozen egg yolks in the fridge after my sponge-cake adventures that needed to be used up.

It was time for some googling.  The most interesting recipe I found was a grapefruit meringue pie.  The only problem was that it required "complete” eggs, since the whites were needed for the meringue.  I thought maybe the filling would work just fine without the meringue, as long as I didn’t try to make it into a pie.

So what do you do with a pie filling without a pie?  You put it in cream puffs. 

I’ll make cream puffs at the drop of a hat.  I’ve filled them with chicken salad for parties, countless versions of pastry cream, even plain vanilla pudding. 

People are intimidated by the dough, but it’s really not difficult. 

You start by boiling water and butter in a saucepan, then adding flour.  When you stir this together, you get a thick, somewhat sticky, dough.  Once it all comes together, it goes into the bowl of a stand mixer to cool until it’s just barely warm. 

Once the dough is cool, you slowly add the eggs with the mixer running.  I poured in something that was as close to “one egg” as possible (the recipe says “add them one at a time” which doesn’t really make sense – if you’ve combined them all into a cup to measure, you can’t really split them back out into individual eggs).  As soon as one egg is incorporated, add more egg.  Repeat until you run out of eggs.

The next challenge is to pipe them into the right shape.  The hard part here is getting the sticky dough into the piping bag.  I use a tall tumbler – the bag goes inside, then gets folded over the rim.  This holds it upright and open while you fill it:

Don’t fill it this full, or it will end up all over your hands when you try to use it:

Stopping a half-inch or so below the top is best. 

Once it’s in the bag, use your biggest plain tip to pipe it into the shape you want.  I made them vaguely cream-puff shaped, but you can also do long éclair shapes if you prefer:

They go in the oven for 20 minutes – the first 10 of that at 425F, to make them “puff”, and then another 10 at 350F to finish them off.  I was slow to turn the oven down, so mine got a bit over-browned on top:

People say you should poke holes in them with a knife while they cool to let the steam out and keep them from getting soggy inside. I think that you should instead assume that they have a shelf life of about 4 hours, and plan to eat them sometime in that window.  I’ve never successfully baked them one day and had them still be edible the next day.

While they were cooling, I made up the filling.  I called it a curd, but it’s thickened with cornstarch, so I believe technically it’s a pudding.  It’s simple – just mix it all up and cook until it thickens.  If you’re very obsessive about lumps, you could run it through a fine strainer when it’s done. 

I filled another piping bag (the disposable ones are so nice for this), poked the tip into the center of the cream puffs, and filled them.  You want to do this just before serving, or they will get soggy.

They came out great, with just the right amount of tartness.  They were a nice change from the ordinarily over-sweet filling that you find in cream puffs.  I’d make them again!

( see the puff recipe )

( see the filling recipe )

Every year, when the holidays are approaching, I take Mike to the grocery store.  We get to the dairy case, and he spots the eggnog.  I look at the quantity of eggnog he’s holding, and I say, “Are you really going to drink that much eggnog?”.

And every year, two weeks after Christmas, I clean out the fridge, and in the back corner I find an entirely unopened bottle of eggnog.

I had 2 days before it expired, so I started looking around for recipes.  It’s easy to find recipes to make your own eggnog, but not quite so easy to find recipes to use up the eggnog you already have.

I found two that looked good.  This is the first one – it’s just a simple bread pudding, with eggnog as the custard.  I happened to have half a loaf of bread on the counter, and I can’t turn down a recipe that uses up two leftover ingredients.

It starts with dried cranberries reconstituted in liquid.  The recipe calls for brandy or bourbon, but a very good quality apple cider works just as well if you want a non-alcoholic version.  I didn’t have cranberries, so I used raisins.

Then the bread gets cubed and put in a big bowl.  2 cups of eggnog gets mixed with a few more eggs, some milk,  a bit of sugar, some vanilla and some nutmeg.

Once the liquid comes together, pour it over the bread, add the fruit, mix well, and pour into a 9×9 pan. 

Bake for almost an hour.  This will make the entire house smell like eggnog.

I missed the instructions to sprinkle sugar over the top before baking, so I added some when it came out of the oven.  It really didn’t need it

All in all, a very good bread pudding.  The eggnog wasn’t over whelming, but it was noticeable. I doubled the nutmeg from the original recipe, and it still could have used a bit more, so I updated it to call for a full teaspoon, and that should bring out the eggnog a bit more.

The other recipe I found?  Dump one quart eggnog and some nutmeg (to taste) in your ice cream maker, then freeze.  That only leaves me with two more cups to use up!

( see the recipe )