With changing leaves and sweater weather come fall treats like caramel apples, chai tea and spicy hot chocolate! My 3-tiered cake is an homage to my favorite flavors, ranging from praline and coffee buttercream to spice cake with a salted caramel drip!
This technical challenge uses Paul Hollywood’s recipe for six sweet and six savory pretzels. The savory pretzels are made with traditional pretzel dough sprinkled with coarse salt and sesame seeds before baking. The sweet variety has poppy seeds and orange zest mixed into the dough. After baking, it’s brushed with orange syrup and garnished with candied orange peel.
My Chicken Curry Gala Pie features layers of coconut rice, curried chicken, peas, roasted butternut squash and, of course, a continuous hard-boiled egg throughout. This Signature savory picnic pie is to be served outside the pan, so the pastry must be strong enough to hold up to all those fillings.
The inspiration for my opera cake came from the popular ‘70s dessert, the Watergate cake. My interpretation of the Watergate cake in operatic form was to make a pistachio joconde sponge brushed with a pistachio syrup and layer it with coconut Swiss meringue buttercream and pineapple filling studded with pecans. I finished it off with a thin chocolate glaze.
Charlottes are related to trifles in that they are unbaked and made in a glass dish or mold. The two most well-known types are charlotte russe and charlotte royale. This technical challenge, set by Mary Berry, has a lot of steps but is not difficult. The end result is a showstopper dessert that is light, fruity and perfect for summer!
Because of their small stature, canapés often feature stronger flavors and richer ingredients than you’d be able to eat in larger quantities. This Signature Challenge called for 12 each of three different kinds of savory canapés. I made smoked salmon-stuffed choux puffs with fresh dill, caprese tartlets with homemade pesto, and parmesan-and-black-sesame crackers with fig-and-goat-cheese spread.
The brief for this challenge had three components. It had to be completely dairy-free, it had to be a vegetable-based cake (think carrot or zucchini) and it had to be in a 3D novelty shape. Mine is a red velvet beet cake in the shape of a coconut cocktail on a sandy beach.
The nuts in this particular dacquoise, obviously, are hazelnuts, but that’s just the start of the flavor profile here. The delicately chewy meringue layers are sandwiched with a coffee custard, topped with swirls of chocolate ganache and caramelized hazelnuts, and surrounded by even more chopped hazelnuts to give it a beautiful finish.
Rye has less gluten than wheat, which results in a heavier loaf with a tighter crumb. This recipe yields a smallish, dense but flavorful loaf, reminiscent of what you find in Europe, perfect with smoked fish and sharp cheese for a wonderful midsummer smorgasbord!
Because the week I made these fell toward the end of Wisconsin strawberry season, I wanted to celebrate this short but oh-so-flavorful season with strawberry-themed pastries: strawberry mille-feuilles with basil-infused mascarpone cream, strawberry Nutella turnovers and chocolate pecan palmier "butterflies" with strawberry hearts.
