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The folks who submitted the challenge asked that all of the bakers include the following message: "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."
The recipe indicated that the Valentino cake would taste mostly like the chocolate you picked out. While I like Chocolate, I didn't do much research, I just picked up what they had at Williams Sonoma...
The recipe has you melting together one pound of the chocolate of your choice with one stick of butter....
Making the cake batter was really easy. While the chocolate and butter mixture is cooling, you are to whip five egg whites into stiff peaks. Then, beat the five yolks (with the same beater/whisk used to whip up the whites) and add the yolks to the chocolate and butter.
Then you fold in the whites with the chocolate, butter and eggs. Then you bake the batter at 375 for 25 minutes or so, or until an instant read thermometer shows 140 and the center is set.
Then it was on to the ice cream!
I didn't have an ice cream maker. (Long story-- we had gotten one as a wedding present from Tom Snyder years ago, but we tried it once and it didn't work...) so it was off to the WS and using a credit from The Mom, I got this great Cuisinart ice cream/sorbet maker. It came with an extra freezer bowl and it is *really* great!! I used David Lebovitz' recipe for vanilla ice cream (as it was similar to the recipe I used at Cornell when I made ice cream in cooking class-- that being the last time I had ever made ice cream). The recipe essentially calls for a custard base. This was really easy (though between this and the cake, can I just say that I actually used *ten* eggs?? WoW!) 
In the end, the ice cream was fab and I'm really looking forward to using the machine to try and recreate some of our favorites from the Bent Spoon like blood orange sorbet! The cake? I wasn't crazy about the cake. It was mostly a brownie like consistency, and unfortunately the chocolate I choose just wasn't sweet enough. But all, in all, a fun challenge!
4 comments:
the ice cream looks great...the cake does look a little dry but Pat in New York who did the challenge also had cake that looked the same way...just like a brownie...
The Mom (yours :-) sent me over here (I, too, am a jersey girl)...so happy to see you're a Daring Baker! I've completely blown the two challenges I've done but this one turned out quite good. And can we discuss this:
"...we had gotten one as a wedding present from Tom Snyder years ago, but we tried it once and it didn't work."
Hello?! That seems worthy of its own blog post. :-)
Good to see that you completed the challenge and that the ice cream worked out for you. Yes I think that you over-whipped the whites but the whole point of Daring Bakers is to do recipes outside our comfort zone. By doing that you will go from a cooker to a baker. I'm still a cooker but with baker tendencies now. Great job on this challenge. Yours from Audax in Australia.
Hi I'm the Pat in NY your Mom told you about.
As Audax said the recipe did caution that if you whipped the whites too much the cake might be dry. Also, cooking to the right temperature and not overcooking it might have had something to do with it being dry.
I thought the cake was very fudge like, and it got better the next day!
Like Laura, I'd like to hear more about the Tom Synder conection! Is THAT Tom Synder? :)
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