Pretty in Pink - Daring Bakers July Challenge

The July Daring Bakers Challenge was organised by Peabody of Culinary Concotions fame, who chose Strawberry Mirror Cake.

A colleague recently left her job to move back to her hometown and during the time we worked together she became a good friend to me. I wanted to make something special for her farewell morning tea and I thought that the mirror cake would be perfect for her since one of her favourite colours is pink.

It’s winter in New Zealand right now so the only strawberries in the stores are imported from the US. I couldn’t find frozen strawberries so as per the allowable ingredient deviations I opted to make a raspberry mirror cake. Wouldn’t you know it on the day I chose to make the cake I went to the supermarket for some fresh cream and saw Australian strawberries at a very reasonable $3.95 per punnet. I chose to stick with the raspberries because I needed to free up the space in my freezer.

I have come to the conclusion that the degree of difficulty of a Daring Bakers challenge should be measured by the number of bowls you dirty during the process. Mirror cake is certainly up there with the best of them. I dirtied 2 bowls for my Genoise sponge, 1 for the syrup, 3 for the Bavarian Cream and another for the mirror – total bowls used = 7 and let’s not count the saucepans.

Getting started....

What went wrong along the way and what would I do differently?

1. I didn’t have a pan suitable for making the sponge so I just used two round cake pans. I think it was a better way of doing it – no wastage.

2. I queried the baking temperature of the sponge because it was hellaciously hot (450 degrees F) and other recipes I’d read were 100 degrees lower. Of course I didn’t query this until I was about the start baking so went with my gut feeling (which turned out to be incorrect) and baked my sponges at the lower temperature. They still turned out OK. A little tip for contact lens wearers – do not be too hasty to peer into the oven or else your contact lenses will feel like they have melted to your eyeballs. I expected them to be all crinkly round the edges when I took them out but I guess they’re made of stronger stuff that I thought.

3. This was really my first attempt at working with gelatin and I had no idea what to expect. The instructions said “Sprinkle the gelatin over the strawberry puree in a small bowl and set aside until spongy.” What spongy meant I didn’t really know. The raspberries I used were pureed straight from the freezer and I worried that my gelatin wasn’t going to do it’s first dissolving bit so I scooped off as much as I could without disturbing the puree. The top had gone a bit wrinkly but I wouldn’t have described it as spongy. I thought it would be a good idea if the raspberries were at least at room temperature so I stirred up the stray bits of gelatin and nuked the puree and tried again. Seemed to work OK.

4. When making my Bavarian cream I think I may have been dangerously close to curdling my mix. I blended it with the gelatin mixture but there was no sigh of it being remotely like the texture of softly whipped cream and I panicked and added some more gelatin (previously softened in water of course). When I layered all the components and put the cake in the fridge to set for the allocated 1-2 hours I was not at all surprised to find that my Bavarian layer was a little on the firm side – oops.

5. Unlike my lucky US counterparts I do not have a fridge with an icemaker and one tray of icecubes wasn’t going to go very far so I just used a bowl of cold tap water to cool my Bavarian cream

6. When it came to making the mirror I didn’t have anything to drain my berries through and sorta kinda maybe just a little bit pressed down on them to extract the juice which of course is what gives you a foamy appearance and why the recipe says not to do it! Fortunately, because I had used raspberries and the colour was very dark it wasn’t too noticeable.

7. In hindsight, I probably wouldn’t have spent $40 on a bottle of booze just to used a couple of tablespoons in this recipe. I don’t think you could taste it. I’m pleased that I hadn’t splashed out and got a slightly more expensive but delicious sounding “raspberricello”.

The verdict – a heck of a lot of faffing about with all the steps involved in creating this masterpiece but I would describe it as gorgeous, impressive, and delicious.

Special thanks to Lis for helping me out with my post this month. You're a doll!

Caramel Creations

A regular reader complained that I hadn't posted in a while so I've unearthed something from my drafts folder to make her happy.



When I’m at the gym with my personal trainer one of the frequent topics of conversation is food since diet and exercise go hand in hand. A while back I was talking about the HHDD Cheesecake Challenge (it was HHDD #10) and mentioned how proud I was that I didn’t yield to temptation. My trainer commented that one of his colleagues really loved cheesecake and because I like nothing more than to bake for other people I saw this as an opportunity to try out Lisa’s cheesecake with the longest name in the world aka Lisa's Decadent and Ohhh So Evil Peanut Butter Dark Chocolate Caramel Ripple Cheesecake - or LDOSEPBDCCRC.

Lisa said her recipe made a huge cheesecake so I opted to cut the recipe in half - I mean really - two POUNDS of cream cheese. Did you read that? TWO POUNDS!! I used oreo cookies for the crust since the recipient of my cheesecake is American and I figured he might like a bit of a taste of home. Interestingly I noted that the oreo cookies we can buy in New Zealand are manufactured in China. I don’t really care for them and find their black colour offputting as a food item. The mixture seemed very buttery so I baked my crust for 10 minutes and then cooled it before adding the filling. When it came to dividing the filling I didn’t get my split 50/50 so the chocolate layer was much smaller than the peanut butter layer. The chocolate layer was a little runny while the peanut butter layer was very thick. I use an unsweetened chunky peanut butter which I think is more like what’s known in the USA as natural peanut butter. It’ll be interesting to see how it works out when I try the various recipes in Dorie Greenspan’s book that say "do not use natural peanut butter". Lisa used crushed candy in her cheesecake mix but I felt there was enough going on in the mix so didn't bother and you can't get that kind of candy in New Zealand anyway. Instead of using caramel sauce I thought I'd be clever and use pre-caramelised sweetened condensed milk which you can buy in the supermarket. It wasn't as great a success as I'd hoped and despite warming the caramel in the microwave and stirring it furiously it didn’t thin out or get very smooth. I ended up just blobbing it in a very unartistic manner on top of the cheesecake and then swirled it around with a skewer.

The recipient of the cheesecake pronounced it delicious and said that it reminded him of one from The Cheesecake Factory. That was Lisa's idea when she created her recipe so I guess she did good. Thank you Lisa for a great recipe.

I had a lot of leftover caramel from my cheesecake baking session and wondered what to do with it. I'm not one to waste things even if it means adding a whole lot of other ingredients to get there. A quick look at the Nestle website provided the perfect recipe – chocolate muffins with a caramel filling. Fortunately for my diet I’ve decided that caramel isn’t really my thing. I wouldn’t go so far as to say I don’t like it but if I was offered free choice from a box of chocolates the caramel filled ones would be the last on my list. However, I really should quantify that because it’s flowing or soft caramels I don’t like. Hard caramels are completely different story - give me a nice turtle or a Russell Stover Pecan Delight and I’m very happy camper. Especially if they’ve been in the freezer and the caramel has chilled to an almost toothbreaking hardness.


Mmmmm - don't these look ooey gooey?

Morven's World of Cake

I'm on the social club committee at work and one of our most popular events each year is a quiz night. We have the usual suspects of sports, entertainment, general knowledge and a company related round but because of my love affair with baking I decided, as quiz mistress, to have my own category. I even included a "guess the mystery ingredient" section where I offered samples of spice cake with tomato soup as the secret ingredient, a kumara cake which was a little like a carrot cake in taste, chocolate sauerkraut cake which was not quite so disgusting as it sounds - truly! Lastly I made a chocolate cola cake (I can't find the recipe but it was one that did not contain marshmallows).

I thought you might like to share the fun so if you would like to play along please send your answers to me at morvenATxtraDOTcoDOTnz with "Morven's World of Cake" as the subject. I'm offering a little foodie package which I will negotiate with the lucky winner.

You have two weeks from today (entries will close on 24 July 2007). Since I'm fairly confident the scores on this quiz will be high I'll draw a random name from all participants.

Who is attributed to the quote “Let them eat cake”?

What is the name of the main actor in the movie “Layer Cake”?

Who painted “Still Life with Cake”?


What is the French word for cake?

Who made the world’s biggest cookie and when?

Who is the patron saint of pastry chefs? (shame on any Daring Baker who does not get this question)

If you were eating a mooncake what would you be celebrating?

What ingredients characterise a "tres leches" cake?

Black Forest cakes contain cherries; what else is associated with the Black Forest? (I will accept one of three things and my decision is final)

And finally, to round things out to a nice even 10, if you offered to bake me a cake, what kind/flavour would I chose? This is merely thrown in so I can provide you with a delicious recipe when I post the answers but if I were judging on correct answers it might be the tiebreaker.