Daring Baker April 2011: Maple Mousse in an Edible Container (Pretzel Bowls!)

The April 2011 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Evelyne of the blog Cheap Ethnic Eatz. Evelyne chose to challenge everyone to make a maple mousse in an edible container. Prizes are being awarded to the most creative edible container and filling, so vote on your favorite from April 27th to May 27th at http://thedaringkitchen.com!

Fortunately for me the host this month provided a both a Maple Mousse and a vegan Maple Mousse recipe. (Kudos Evelyne - It is appreciated!) She also provided recipes for bacon bowls (along with a link to a Tofu Bacon recipe), and nut bowls. I decided to take things a step further, and try to come up with my own sort of edible container. My idea: soft pretzel bowls.

I used the soft pretzel recipe from The Joy of Vegan Baking (pg 174). These are a yeast- bread type of recipe, so rather than one of our usual after-work baking nights, I baked these on a weekend (ended up being Easter weekend, actually) and so I tackled this challenge alone. The yeast (proofed in sugar water) was added to flour, salt and oil. The dough was way too wet, and I ended up adding almost a full cup of additional flour. (I measured my original flour using my kitchen scale and the weight given in the recipe. I would be interested to see if my dough would have been better had I used the measuring cups, and not weight).

Once the dough stuck together, and not to the bowl or my hands, I transferred it to an oiled bowl, covered with plastic wrap and a damp towel, and put the whole thing in my dormant oven. While I waited for the dough to rise, I settled in to making the maple mousse.

Dough - pre-rise.

Dough - post-rise.

Ingredients for Vegan Maple Mousse.

The vegan Maple Mousse recipe called for maple syrup, soft silken tofu, and agar-agar. I still don't have agar-agar powder (or even flakes), and I ended up breaking up a full bar. A quick search on the Internet turned up this page, http://www.foodsubs.com/ThickenGelatins.html, which give the 2 teaspoon of agar powder as equivalent of 3 Tablespoons of agar flakes, or 1 kanten bar.

First I put the tofu in the food processor, and ran it until I got a nice creamy consistency. Next I flaked the kanten bar as best I could, and let it sit in the maple syrup for 5 minutes, then turned on the heat. After about 15 minutes on the stovetop it got thicker, though there were still harder bits of the agar from the seam area of the kanten bar. I added the thickened maple syrup to the tofu in the food processor, and blended it, then transferred it to a bowl and popped it in the fridge.

Agar in maple syrup ...

...after sitting for 5 minutes.

Agar and maple syrup over heat.

Agar/Maple syrup on blended tofu. Stringy.

Maple Mousse.

When it came time to check the dough, I was surprised at how much it had risen. I punched it
down, and separated it into 12 smaller dough balls. The recipe calls to let these sit for another 10 minutes, but due to a brief interlude for dinner, mine sat for about 30-40 minutes.

Dough balls - an even dozen to work with.

My idea was to make a woven bowl out of the pretzel dough. I rolled out traditional pretzel lengths from the separated dough, then rolled them a bit more to get more length. I wove the three thinner strands for the side of the bowl, and ended up making smaller strands to weave for the bottom.

Rolled out by hand.

Pretzel braid, and smaller pretzel weave for the bottom.

Foil to keep the pretzel bowls from sticking.

I put aluminum foil over the bottom of my (new) large-cup cupcake pan, and placed the woven bottom on, then wrapped the braided strands around the cup, pinching together where the dough met.

The pretzel recipe calls to dip the pretzels in a water/baking soda combo before placing them on the cookie sheet, and then sprinkling them with course salt. I did not dip my braids, rather, put them on the mold, and then brushed them with the water/baking soda combo. Since the bowls would be holding what I considered a desert, I sprinkled on a mixture of granulated sugar, large decorators sugar and ground cinnamon.

Uncooked pretzel cup.

The bowls "poofed", but that helped keep the bowls together.

The pretzel bowls baked for about 18 minutes. A few things I didn't count on: soft pretzels - as a yeast-based delight, poofed out when the baked; the weave on the bottom was thinner than the braid, and browned a lot more than the sides; the bottom also bowed out from the cupcake pan mold; and finally large-cup cupcake pans are huge as a mold.

Interior of pretzel bowl.

Pretzel bowl.

Maple Mousse in a pretzel bowl.

My husband helped me eat my model bowl with mousse. He liked the taste. I was surprised by the lightness of the pretzels, and a bit sad to find that the "seams" of the kanten bar left little hard chunks blended in the maple mousse. The cinnamon and sugar went well with the mousse, but overall I think my dessert ended up being a bit to *something* (sweet? too many flavors?) for my taste.

Et, voila.

I am interested in trying the soft pretzel recipe again, and in playing with the dough to see if I can make even more interesting shapes (or smaller edible containers). I also was interested in trying my hand at fillo (phyllo?) dough based bowls, if I can get my hands on shredded fillo dough.

New tools/ ingredients:  large-cup cupcake pan
Recipes used: Daring Baker provided Vegan Maple Mousse recipe; Soft Pretzels The Joy of Vegan Baking, page 174
Co-bakers:  Solo Mission
Date: April 24, 2011

Cake Balls - April 20 & 22, 2011

Wednesday April 20

For this week, Allyson suggested cake-pops, as she was considering them for a mother's day gift. Since we were pulling ideas together at the last minute, and since what she proposed was doable with ingredients on hand (once we omitted the "pop" part), we tackled this treat. (Regrettably I did not get photos of most of the process, but did remember to snap a few at the end.)

Before Allyson came over I flipped through my cookbooks to find a suitable cake and was pleased to realize that I had, a few months past, frozen just the right amount of sliced strawberries to use in the Strawberry Cupcakes from JVB pg. 87.

I measured out the wet ingredients, and then, while I was running the frozen chunks of strawberries through the food processor, Allyson measured and mixed the dry ingredients.  

The resulting batter was a very pink. Since the fate of our finished baked delight was to simply be crumbled up again, we opted to make a cake rather than cupcakes, to save on cup-cake pan liners.

Once the cake was in the oven, we discussed options for frosting. For cake-balls, a cake is crumbled and mixed with frosting (3/4 of a can of frosting, according to the online recipe Allyson had read, and on which we were basing our project), and then dipped in chocolate.

As we were discussing options, I recalled I had a large amount of left-over lime butter cream frosting from the coconut-lime birthday cupcakes I'd made for my sister (vctotw pg 108) *Until I looked up the recipe for this post I would have sworn that the frosting was also coconut-lime, not just lime - that explains a lot, actually. 

I pulled the tub from the fridge, and inspected it closely. Though it had been a month, the frosting still seemed ok - a taste test proved it to be so. We figured that the combination of strawberry with coconut-lime might be usual, but wouldn't be bad. With our frosting situation set, we tidied the kitchen, and sat down to wait out the cake - baking process.

About 25 minutes in, the cake smelled delicious, so we went to check. Mostly done - another 2 minutes and the toothpick came out clean, so we removed the cake from the oven. I'm glad we followed our noses rather than the recipe on this (which said 30 minutes for cupcakes, and 1 hour for a cake). Looking at the recipe again later I realize it stipulated a loaf pan, which was significantly deeper than the standard 9" square cake pan we used. With the cake out of the oven we saw the cake had started to pull away from the edge of the pan, and were disappointed that the cake was golden, having lost the beautiful pink it had been uncooked.

We let the cake cool, and after about 10 minutes, managed to flip it out onto a wire rack. It was still slightly warm when we went to crumble it, but it was getting late, and we had already decided to save the dipping in chocolate for Friday, when we meet up with friends. Since we'd only have a small window of time before gaming commenced (yes, we are D&D geeks - but our gaming group is full of willing taste-testers), we wanted to have the cake balls formed and chilled before then.

We did a mini trial with a spoonful of cake crumbs and a little of the frosting, and determined the taste was not horrible. We ended up using about 2 cups of frosting, stirring it in to the crumbled cake in spoonfuls until the mix held together on its own. We set to with the cookie scoop and a spoon, and made balls about 2 - 2 ½ " in diameter, which we covered and set in the fridge to chill, and wait until Friday.

Friday April 22

The chocolate-dipping was to take place at Allyson's house, so I brought over the cake balls and a bag of vegan chocolate and white chocolate chips. Allyson set up her double boiler, and we decided to start with the straight up chocolate.

"Seized" chocolate

Now, the original recipe called for candy melts, and I suspect these may result in a different consistency of liquid chocolate than straight up melted chocolate chips. Coating the cake balls ended up being a challenge. We ended up having to re-mold the cake balls, as they threatened to crumble as we rolled them in the melted chocolate. Because of the consistency of the chocolate, we did not get a smooth coating on most of them (aggravated by the fact the treats lacked sticks, so we had no real way to move them through the chocolate other than by fork and wooden paddle). Also we learned, the hard way, that when your chocolate is getting too thick, do not try to remedy it by adding water. (according to this Good Eats video, a little liquid in chocolate causes seizing - which we had - remedy is more liquid. Next time we'll know (~minute 7:45)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLpt_n6kWss)  Luckily we had more chocolate. We decided to stick to regular chocolate, and coated most of the rest of the cake balls, leaving some uncoated for people who didn't want to experience flavor overload.

Uncoated and chocolate-dipped cake balls

Overall, the chocolate and lime seemed to dominate the flavor, though the texture of the cake balls was definitely influenced by the harder-to-crumble edges of the cake, and the slightly pulpy strawberry blend. I would like to try this recipe again, perhaps with a plain cake and simple flavor icing, and see if we can improve on the chocolate application technique (deeper bowl? treats on a stick? pouring chocolate over the treat?)

New tools/ ingredients:  none
Recipes used: Strawberry Cupcakes Joy of Vegan Baking pg 87;  Lime Buttercream Frosting Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World  pg 108
Co-bakers: Allyson
Date: April 20 and 22, 2011

Vegan Black and White Cookies

Allyson, Lila and I decided to try our hand at a "fancy cookie" recipe, and the draw of Black and White cookies was strong. We had most of the ingredients on hand, but had to purchase lemon extract.

The recipe called for adding lemon juice to soy milk, to allow the milk to curdle. We added the remaining liquids and sugar to the mix. Dry ingredients were mixed separately, and the wet ingredients were added to a well pressed in the center. As we were mixing the ingredients together we noticed that the result was less like other cookie doughs, and more like a cake batter.

Wet ingredients before adding sugar-  reminded me of modern art.

We scooped the batter onto silpat covered cookie sheets. The scoops spread, looking very much like pancakes as they settled and spread onto the baking surface.

Cookie batter going on the pan.

The cookies baked for about 20 minutes, though through the batches we fiddled a little with the temperature and the time needed to bake - I had a new oven thermometer, and discovered that my oven actually runs cool. That in addition to the Silpat added to the recommend baking time.

Large cookies - they spread even more that we expected.

Another thing that surprised me about this recipe was that the icing actually goes on the bottom of the cookies. It made sense once I thought about it, as the bottom of the cookie was flat from the pan, and the top was slightly raised, like the dome of a cake (not surprising given the texture of the batter.)

Bottom of the cookies were flat - the side we iced.

While the cookies cooled we made the icing. We added almond extract to the confectioners sugar and warm water as the vanilla extract I have is not clear, and I didn't want to ruin the color "off-white and black cookies" just doesn't have the same ring. When we first made the icing we didn't add enough water, though we didn't realize it until we used most of it up, the recipe said there should be enough left after completely icing the cookies in white to mix with melted chocolate to make the black icing. We ended up adding more water to the mix for the remainder of the white portion, and then more water and sugar to add to the chocolate.

Making Icing - warm water in confectioner's sugar

The white icing went over the entire cookie, and then the chocolate icing was spread on top of that over half the cookie. We set to work with an off-set spatula and a butter knife. Our lines weren't terribly straight, but as we went along, we got a better handle on it.

Each cookie gets iced completely with white - the chocolate half is actually double iced.

The cookies were nice and light (being essentially cakes), if large. While the thicker icing produced a better white color, those cookies that had the thinner white icing were a bit less overwhelming on the sweetness. The orange and lemon extract in the cookies made a nice flavor, though Allyson, Lila and I agreed that if we didn't know what was in the cookies, we probably wouldn't have been able to identify exactly what the taste was. All in all, the cookies were a success, and I hope to make them again soon.

About 6" in diameter, these were big cookies

New tools/ ingredients:  Lemon Extract
Recipes used: NYC Black and White Cookies Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar pg 160-163
Co-bakers: Allyson, Lila
Date: April 6, 2011