Zol-au-Vent and Vol-au-Rocher

The September 2009 Daring Bakers' challenge was hosted by Steph of A Whisk and a Spoon. She chose the French treat, Vols-au-Vent based on the Puff Pastry recipe by Michel Richard from the cookbook Baking With Julia by Dorie Greenspan.

This was a nice challenge, but I had an accidental shortcut to it.
September has been pretty hot here, not exactly the right climate to make puff pastry.
BUT!



I had in the freezer some I had made in late spring. I kept it there as a last resort, waiting until the last moment to see if I had a cold day to document the entire challenge, but the cold day never came (and I can't say I'm sorry for that), so I hope that my word on being the maker of the pastry is valid enough as for the accomplishment of the challenge.
It must be, because if I had bought it, it sure would have risen much better!



Vol-au-vents are tricky to eat: the puff pastry crumbles a lot (at least, you hope it does!) and when they are big you risk The Big Splash Of Content.
That's why I went for bite-size.
Maybe too much, but in my opinion this is a case where smaller is better.

I made an appetizer and a dessert.
The appetizer involves one of my family's all time favourites: gorgonzola, which was paired with pears.



Nothing else: the pears were ripe and juicy enough to give out the right amount of liquid and only a few seconds of heat were needed to melt the zola in order to mix the two.



The dessert was a reinterpretation of a Ferrero Rocher, the puff pastry playing the part of the wafer.



A quick ganache with Nutella and whipped cream, added with ground hazelnuts.

In my intentions, a whole hazelnut was to be in the center of the vol-au-vent, but a whole hazelnut didn't fit in the bitesize structure without pulling the balance with chocolate too much.




I wish my husband took some classes of creative food writing: asking for an opinion and just getting "MMMMHHHH!" for an answer, as much as participated it is, is starting not to be enough for me.

Daring Bakers August 2009 - Dobos Torte

The August 2009 Daring Bakers' challenge was hosted by Angela of A Spoonful of Sugar and Lorraine of Not Quite Nigella. They chose the spectacular Dobos Torte based on a recipe from Rick Rodgers' cookbook Kaffeehaus: Exquisite Desserts from the Classic Caffés of Vienna, Budapest, and Prague.
You will find the detailed recipe at their blogs.

Boy, you do have to love eggs, when you have this torte!!
Between the dough and the buttercream you will find 10 whole eggs. And little else: this dessert, despite the rich appearance has a lot to do with fluffy stuff and incorporating air.



The fun thing about this cake is that the layers are not cut from a one cake, but are baked separately, oven-pancake style, and then trimmed to the same size and shape to be assembled with the buttercream.
This scared me a lot, every layer has to be baked just a few minutes, so you basically have to stay around the oven for about an hour. Not exactly thrilling when the weather is hot and humid and the thermometer scores 43C/110F! I took advantage of one afternoon when it "chilled" down to 39C/102F and did my duty of Daring Baker.





The weakest link for me in this recipe was the caramel part. I suck at caramelizing, I always seem to miss the right moment (or never get there, that is).
This time it was not so bad. Not perfect, I could have waited a little longer because the sugar was a little too liquid and soaked in the cake instead of building a layer of its own on top, but it's good enough for me!
By the way, I have to thank Angela for the suggestion of cutting the top layer before pouring caramel: as things went, I would have never been able to have those nice triangles!



I hadn't any whole hazelnuts at hand, so I used bits of chocolate as (not quite) hidden support.



The only problem is, my kids are a bit disoriented; they keep asking whose birthday is it, and won't accept a "Nobody's" for an answer.
They have cut about 20 construction paper sheet into confetti, and are waiting for daddy to come home to start the party.

You will find a lot of other Dobos torte and lot of rivisitations at the Daring Kitchen website.