My first Daring Bakers challenge complete ! For those of you who aren't familiar with the Daring Bakers, we are a group of bloggers from around the world that make the same recipe each month and post about it on on our blogs on the same day. After lurking around on several Daring Bakers sites I finally got the courage to join the group and attempt to bake with the best.
Our October challenge was a twist on the Boston Cream Pie. Chosen by our host Mary from alpineberry, it is an individual serving of vanilla custard with a piece of chiffon cake on top, drizzled with rich chocolate sauce. Initially the Bostini Cream Pie recipe appeared to be more complex than it actually was. After a little pondering it over, research and review, it was actually quite simple. Here is a little insight to my process....
The custard:
Always intimidating, but if you don't panic, it comes out great. As soon as the cream started to boil, I tempered the eggs and added them into the cream, constantly stirring. The custard set up immediately after I added the eggs. There was almost a foam over with the cream but it settled back down once the tempered eggs were poured in. Next time I would have lowered the temperature throughout the whole process. I strained and poured the custard into several different sized dishes and stuck them all in the refrigerator for an overnight set up.
The chiffon cake:
Before beating the eggs, I let them come to room temperature which resulted in perfectly whipped peaks. I sacrificed 1/3 of the whipped eggs by adding them to the batter to lighten it up before folding in the remaining egg whites. I poured the batter into a 13 x 9 glass baking dish and a 9 x 9 baking dish and popped them in the oven. After 25 minutes they looked perfect and sprung back when lightly touched.
After cooling I turned them out onto baking sheets. To my surprise the larger cake was nowhere near done. The middle of the cake was on the gooey side. I was so afraid of over baking it that I under baked it. Thankfully, the other pan turned out just fine. I cut pieces of the cake out using different sized glasses as cookie cutters, then placed them on top of the bowls of custard.In the meantime, I made the chocolate sauce by melting the butter and just bringing it to a foam. Then I removed it from the stove and stirred in the small chocolate hunks. It came out delectable!
My one substitution was using coconut milk instead of orange juice for the chiffon cake. I added a little cream to the coconut milk just to thin it a bit. My batter was still pretty thick but I was hoping that was the way it was supposed to be. I highly recommend the coconut milk substitution if you do not like a citrus/chocolate combo.
What did I learn... next time I will fold the egg whites into the batter more thoroughly and cook the cake a little longer. Other than that everything came out as planned.A preferred serving option discovered by accident -
Cut the chiffon cake into pieces...squares, circles, whatever you want.. and fill them with custard (just pipe it in with a pastry bag or cut each piece of cake in half and make a custard sandwich). Coat the custard filled cakes with chocolate, set them on a baking sheet on top of a layer of wax paper and put them in the refrigerator to cool and set up. After a couple of hours they are ready to serve on top of a bowl of custard or on their own. Like a thick chocolate dipped HoHo. Put the extras in the freezer for future consumption. Gotta love a frozen Ding Dong.
