First, the obligatory paragraph for the blog checking program (I would change that semi-colon and the “we” — I would use a “they” instead, since I’m not one of the people who actually picked the challenge, but then the blog checker might not find it, so here you go):
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.
Actually, I had made flourless cakes before. My standard recipe is quite similar, but a little bit less dense, so I was looking forward to trying this one to see how they compare. You can find a post of my flourless cake on my blog here, although it looks like I never got around to posting the recipe (I’ll do that later today or tomorrow).
My recipe uses less chococolate, one more egg, less butter and a tiny bit of sugar, but it’s basically the same idea.
Here you have the photo comparision. My cake:
My version
And this month’s challenge:
This Month's Daring Bakers Challenge
And the plated photo of this month’s challenge:
The recipe can be found on this month’s hosts’ blogs.
As the challenge was similar to what I’d done before, this wasn’t very difficult. I used Callebaut 70.4% chocolate, because I like things dark, and because that’s what I had at home (I bake with it a lot, so I buy it in big bricks).
The comparision: I like mine better, because it’s less dense, and I like the texture better. Also, I think that because this one had so much more chocolate, it became a little too intense in chocolate taste (well, can you ever have too much chocolate?), whereas mine is still really really chocolatey, but a bit less intense, even done with the same chocolate. This one I liked best within a couple of hours of it coming out of the oven, and after that I had put it in the fridge.. even after I warmed it up, it was too dense after that and I didn’t like it as much.
Now for the ice cream: Although the blog checker paragraph says that the challenge included ice cream recipes from each host, in reality we were allowed to choose whatever ice cream recipe we wanted, or even not use ice cream at all (esp for vegans). I made two ice cream recipes from icecreamireland.com; Chocolate Chip Banana ice cream and Chocolate Chip Mint ice cream. I love Ice Cream Ireland recipes (I had tried them before) because of their richness. Yum for custardy ice creams! These have egg yolks and cream and all sorts of richnesses in it. I personally loved the mint one best, though the banana ice cream was great too. Compared to when I was in Korea, my ice cream bowls that I put in the freezer were a bit deeper, which was a mistake, I think.. the ice cream came out slightly crystalized, whereas it hadn’t when I made it in Korea. Anyway, it was still very tasty. Here’s one more photo highlighting the yummy ice cream:
And that’s it! As usual, check out the other Daring Bakers’ posts here and the Daring Baker forum here.
Happy munching!
