The March 2011 Daring Baker’s Challenge was hosted by Ria of Ria’s Collection and Jamie of Life’s a Feast. Ria and Jamie challenged The Daring Bakers to bake a yeasted Meringue Coffee Cake.
Download the pdf of the challenge.
I don’t consider myself a natural born baker. I’m more comfortable cooking. But I do feel really comfortable baking with yeast. I even keep a starter with wild yeast I caught myself. Today I made a lovely caraway buckwheat boule. We had for it dinner tonight with ham and Saint Andre cheese. Caraway and Saint Andre cheese were made for each other. But that’s another story.
This month I was happy that the challenge was a yeasted coffee cake. I love being challenged, but I’ve felt lazy this month. I bake bread a lot so it was easy to fit making the coffee cake into my schedule, with no unfamiliar surprises popping up along the way.
As an added bonus, we were stuffing this one with sweetened meringue, along with other goodies. I didn’t stray too far from the original recipe of cinnamon, sugar, dark chocolate and toasted pecans. However, since I like fruit in coffee cake I added some raspberries, for a tart contrast. I also felt too lazy to make a ring, so I made a faux braid, a technique I learned at a King Arthur class. It’s really easy to do and it bakes up very pretty.
As a bonus, I had extra meringue and raspberries, so I decided to make a variation on Queen of Pudding. I sweetened the raspberries and cooked them down into a thick jam. I put a Trader Joe’s shortbread cookie with chocolate filling into the bottom of some ramekins, topping with jam, meringue and toasted pecans. I baked them for about 5 minutes at 425, until they started to brown. We ate them while they were still warm. Bliss!
Oh, and the coffee cake was lovely too. I knew it would be hard to go wrong with an egg and butter rich dough, stuffed with some of my favorite things, served warm, with more butter. More bliss!
March 27, 2011 at 2:16 pm |
Your braided coffee cake looks fantastic and beautiful and I am sure it was absolutely delicious.And those little puddings are so cute – I will have to give that a try! Wonderful job on the challenge.
March 27, 2011 at 3:29 pm |
Love this braid! It’s gorgeous and the filling with the bright raspberries is divine!
March 28, 2011 at 12:59 am |
The braiding looks so perfect to me I will have to learn how to do that and the addition of berries sounds smashing to counter the slight sweetness of the other ingredients. And the small puds look so cute well done on this challenge.
Cheers from Audax in Sydney Australia.
March 31, 2011 at 2:12 am |
I love that faux braid trick. The whole thing looks amazing.