Saturday, November 29, 2008

Daring Bakers Challenge- Caramel Cake




This month Daring Bakers challenge was a fun one. I even actually made the challenge earlier in the month, which seems to be a rarity lately. Our wonderful hosts for this months challenge were Dolores of Chronicles in Culinary Curiosity, Alex of Blondie and Brownie and Jenny of Foray into Food. These wonderful foodies had us make Shuna Fish Lydon's caramel cake with caramelized butter frosting. Yum! My cake came out quite nicely and the cake itself has a real subtle hint of caramel. The frosting was very sweet to me. It almost overpowered the cake. I did not use all the icing on my cake and I still felt it was too sweet. I think the cake would be perfect with just a little powdered sugar over the top or even a dollop of whipped cream. I think the next time I make this cake( and I would definitely make it again), that is what I would do. Part of the recipe is to make a caramel syrup. I have found the syrup to be very useful. I used to on my Gingerbread cake with Sabayon and on a apple pie I made recently. Check out Shuna's blog, Eggbeater. You can find the recipe here from Bay Area Bites.




There was an optional second part to this challenge. It was to make Alice Medrich's recipe for Golden Vanilla Bean Caramels. The recipe is from her book Pure Desserts (Artisan Press, 2007). The recipe is also at Dolores blog. I am usually pretty good at making candy, but I must have turn my head away to just a minute before the caramel got to temperature, because it turned out really hard. Not the soft caramel I was expecting. It tasted good, if you let is completely melt in your mouth and not chew, least a tooth or filling would fall out.

4 comments:

Sara said...

too bad your caramels didn't turn out as you expected. your cake looks great though.

Bumblebutton said...

Lovely cake--I think the cake would be delicious as you said--with just a bit of powdered sugar on top. So sorry your caramels didn't turn out...for once mine did! Nice job!

Gretchen Noelle said...

I think the whipped cream would be a great idea to balance out the dense cake. Great job!!

Allie said...

Thanks for the comment! I didn't attempt the candy part I always have bad luck with it. I agree the whipped cream would have been enough on the cake. I sure did make the cake go around longer with everyone taking smaller slices due to it being so sweet!

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