The August 2010 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Elissa of 17 and Baking. For the first time, The Daring Bakers partnered with Sugar High Fridays for a co-event and Elissa was the gracious hostess of both. Using the theme of beurre noisette, or browned butter, Elissa chose to challenge Daring Bakers to make a pound cake to be used in either a Baked Alaska or in Ice Cream Petit Fours. The sources for Elissa’s challenge were Gourmet magazine and David Lebovitz’s “The Perfect Scoop”.
This month’s Daring Bakers’ challenge was to make a pound cake AND ice cream for use in either a Baked Alaska or Petit Fours. The Baked Alaska was a little retro for my taste (and frankly, my freezer couldn’t handle it) so I started leaning towards the petit fours. Something was preventing me from getting fully on board with the idea of petit fours, I think it’s the fact that they are just so… petit!
As I started thinking about the challenge I thought why not make large petit fours more akin to an ice cream sandwich. I mean, who doesn’t love an ice cream sandwich? And so the plan was born. It also occurred to me that my peaches were going to go bad so I thought why not incorporate them into the mix? Rather than making a peach ice cream I decided to make peaches foster (peaches in a rum butter sauce) and use some of the chopped up peaches in the sandwich. Um, how divine does that sound?
The pound cake was easy to make and turned out fabulously. It has this really great toasted butter taste throughout and I love the colour of the cake (it has tiny brown flecks). It was also really moist which I attribute to the fact that you measure the flour AFTER it has been sifted. I’ve never been a big pound cake fan but I wold definitely make the cake again.
I ended up not making the ice cream. I make ice cream all the time so it’s not really a skill that I felt the need to explore. AND I recently won a great ice cream prize pack from President’s Choice via eat. live. travel. write. so it felt silly to MAKE ice cream when I had ice cream at my disposal. So I picked up a tub of vanilla and used that.
Things began to fall apart during assembly. It was easy enough to make the chocolate glaze but I couldn’t really get a system down for glazing the sandwiches without the ice cream oozing out. It was beyond frustrating. I do have to give myself props though for spreading some of the liquid from the peaches foster on the slices of pound cake.
My little experiment turned out well. I was nervous that the peaches and chocolate wouldn’t go together, but they did! I think the rum helped. The pound cake remains nice and moist even in the freezer so I think these things have longevity.
Here are a few of the recipe links…
Brown butter pound cake
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I love peaches, and vanilla ice cream is my favorite, so your flavor combination sounds absolutely perfect to me! I am sure that the peaches and sauce on the cake itself are part of why the cake stayed moist in the freezer, but that is a great thing – definitely helps the cake last longer. Sorry the glazing process was frustrating, but those look and sound absolutely delicious, so all’s well that ends well, right?? Great work on the challenge.
Well they tasted good, right? I am sorry to have bowed out but just didn’t have time. I will be making these sometime though. I think if you freeze the cake filled with the icecream and have the chocolate glaze at a “just so” temperature, it might be better but I know that is super frustrating. Good for you for making them tho!