Daring Bakers challenge: Chocolate Valentino cake w. homemade ice cream
28 Feb
Daring Bakers is a place where a community of bloggers follow the same recipe, while providing them the freedom to add a new ingredient or two (or four). Then, everyone posts their creations on the same day of the month. I’m simply amazed at the things people come up with!
The February 2009 challenge is hosted by Wendy of WMPE’s blog and Dharm of Dad ~ Baker & Chef. They have chosen a Chocolate Valentino cake by Chef Wan; a Vanilla Ice Cream recipe from Dharm and a Vanilla Ice Cream recipe from Wendy as the challenge.
For this challenge, I wasn’t very creative at all. Instead, I focused on making classic desserts- a flourless chocolate cake paired with vanilla bean ice cream from scratch. I’ve made a flourless chocolate cake before, so I wasn’t too concerned about that. It was the ice cream I was worried about, especially since I don’t have an ice cream maker.
I will get to the ice cream results in a second. Let’s start with the cake recipe first. This was in honor of St. Valentine- that explains the heart shapes of the cake (can you say awwwwww?).
Ingredients:
16 ounces (1 pound) of semisweet chocolate, roughly chopped (I used dark and added 2 tsps of cocoa powder)
½ cup (1 stick) plus 2 tablespoons of unsalted butter
5 large eggs, separated
Procedure:
1. Put chocolate and butter in a heatproof bowl and set over a pan of simmering water and melt, stirring often. *This is also called a double broiler. Be careful not to make the water too hot, as the chocolate will curdle.
2. While your chocolate butter mixture is cooling. Butter your pan and line with a parchment circle then butter the parchment.
3. Separate the egg yolks from the egg whites and put into two medium/large bowls.
4. Whip the egg whites in a medium/large grease free bowl until stiff peaks are formed (do not over-whip or the cake will be dry).
5. With the same beater beat the egg yolks together.
6. Add the egg yolks to the cooled chocolate.
7. Fold in 1/3 of the egg whites into the chocolate mixture and follow with remaining 2/3rds. Fold until no white remains without deflating the batter.
8. Pour batter into prepared pan, the batter should fill the pan 3/4 of the way full, and bake at 375F/190C.
9. Bake for 25 minutes until an instant read thermometer reads 140F/60C.
10. Cool cake on a rack for 10 minutes then unmold.
This recipe is great for my dark chocolate lovers out there. Notice there was no sugar involved in this cake? The fluffed egg whites made this cake very light. It was definitely not as sweet as regular cake but that’s what the ice cream is for!
As for the ice cream – it took forever to freeze and didn’t taste as good as I had hoped, despite my using real vanilla beans! I think I followed the recipe of one and the freezing directions of another. It was supposed to take about 3 hours. Instead, it took over 6 hours to make. The end result was a semi-bland flavored ice cream with what look like freezer burn (but it really isn’t).
I hope to make more of a splash in creativity and execution for the next challenge. I am going to post a really good homemade ice cream recipe in the near future. Stay tuned!
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