Rabbit has now joined Daring Bakers, a secret society of kamikaze bakers who post monthly on their clandestine missions. 

The February 2009 challenge is hosted by Wendy of WMPE’s blog and Dharm of Dad ~ Baker & Chef.
We 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.

First, I loved the scalability of this recipe. Although the full recipe calls for one heart shaped cake/pan (hence the name), I made a quarter recipe, thus producing four chocolate-y hockey pucks of delicious-ity. Rabbitz invested in an ice cream maker, an electric eggbeater and a muffin tin to facilitate this recipe… so we estimate that each of our pucks cost about $25.00. It was actually well worth it and we were really chuffed with the results of this challenge.  

We began baking on a Saturday night after a bottle of Coppola’s cab. I melted the chocolate as instructed using Lindt dark chocolate bars. Here’s the crime scene -

I beat the eggs and I was quite excited to see them behaving as anticipated (stiff peaks!), when I suddenly realized that I’d forgotten to add butter during the chocolate melting phase, demonstrating that one can actually mess up a four-ingredient recipe. The butter was very soft so I just lobbed it into the still slightly warm chocolate mixture and it all blended just fine. My sous buttered and parchment-ed our muffin tins and we put the product in the oven and hoped for the best.

We adjusted the baking time for a small batch and cooked our cakes for 12 minutes, allowing for the fact that our oven is known to be a little lazy. My cakes looked quite luscious coming of the oven, but they did fall considerably (and they were kinda short stacks to begin with).

 Chef Wan’s Valentino Recipe:

Ingredients:

16 ounces (1 pound) (454 grams) of semisweet chocolate, roughly chopped


½ cup (1 stick) plus 2 tablespoons (146 grams total) of unsalted butter


5 large eggs separated


However, since I produced a ¼ recipe, I used the following proportions:

110-ish grams of chocolate

* I used a dark Lindt Bar

¼ stick of butter plus a little gob

1 egg (separated)

1. Pre-heat over to 375F.

2. Melt the chocolate and butter in a heatproof bowl over a pan of simmering water (do not let the water touch the bottom of the bowl.

3. Let chocolate cool.

4. Line pan with parchment paper and butter.

* I used standard muffin tins and made four little fairy cakes. I think it would also have been OK to make three slightly fatter cakes.

5. Separate the egg yoke from white and put each in a bowl.

6. Whip the egg white until stiff peaks form (do not over-whip or the cake will be dry).

7. Beat the egg yolk.

8. Add the egg yolk to the cooled chocolate.

9. Fold the egg whites into the chocolate mixture, gradually working in about 1/3 at a time.

10. Pour batter into prepared pan and bake at 375F.

* The recipe calls for 25 minutes of baking time but I baked my ¼ recipe for about 12 minutes. Our oven is a little slow so one might have to adjust accordingly.

We served the pucks with vanilla bean frozen yogurt. We opted out of ice cream because we both sorta froze (ahem!) when we realized the amount of unadulterated bad-good-ness that actually goes into ice cream. The frozen yogurt was slightly tangy and the texture is less cream-y than ice cream (logically enough), but we both kinda liked that tang which also helped cut the sweet of this fantastic dessert. Also, this was the first time I’d actually worked with a vanilla bean and I was really charmed by the pod - what a gorgeous bit of nature!

Vanilla Bean Yogurt

3 cups yogurt (preferably Greek style) see below)


1/3 cup sugar


1 teaspoon vanilla extract or scrapings from one vanilla bean 

Mix together the yogurt, sugar, and vanilla bean or extract. 

Freeze in your ice cream maker according to the manufacturer’s instructions.

I’d definitely make this again for guests or even for us since the ability to so easily make this a small batch recipe is a fantastic bonus for little households that are pas de deux (like ours!).

I’m quite fascinated by the alchemy and variation that even this relatively “easy” recipe exhibits. I could see trying to repeat, vary, and perfect this dish… but I’m anxious that if I pursued this goal with too much enthusiasm Richard Simmons will have to come cut me out of my house in a year.

This has been a great intro to Daring Baking and thanks to Dharm and Wendy for laying down this challenge.

Future challenge for Rabbit:

1. Better foodstyle-ing… I am in pornographic awe of the wonderful photos coming out of Daring Bakers’ kitchens. I hope to improve my own photo skills as these challenges to on.

2. I would like to try this recipe with different kinds of chocolate.

3. I wonder if things would have been any different if I actually put the butter in when instructed? 

Looking forward to next month!!

Posted on February 28th, 2009 by rabbit
Filed under: Uncategorized