Daring Bakers Oktober Challenge: Banana Crunch Doughnuts (filled with blueberry jam) and a family recipe

The October 2010 Daring Bakers challenge was hosted by Lori of Butter Me Up. Lori chose to challenge DBers to make doughnuts. She used several sources for her recipes including Alton Brown, Nancy Silverton, Kate Neumann and Epicurious.

At my region this kind of deep-fried stuff is called "Pfannkuchen" or "Berliner" (called after our capital of course). In carnival it's a kind of tradition to fill some of them with musturd - so if you're not lucky you'll find a very "special" one. During the last years you can also buy ones filled with egg nogg or chocolate but I prefer the traditional version with cherry or strawberry jam, covered with granulated sugar. Some use sugar glaze, but that's not how I like them. In my family we have a special recipe for "Quarkbällchen" what are small balls with a dough containing raisins and quark. I'll give you the recipe here, but I haven't made them in a while, so I unfortunately have no pictures what they are supposed to look like.

I have made doughnuts before, especially because I adore the ones from Dunkin Donuts and wanted to recreate them. Unfortunately it's a 3 hours drive to Berlin which is the next place I can get the original ... My maple sirup version (yeast dough) was not bad but far from the taste I expected. So I decided this time to go for dough without yeast. Some time ago I found I recipe by Tartelette, one of my favourite blogs which was using bananas. I saved it amoung my 'I have to bake/cook this' list but never came to the point actually doing it - until now. As I wanted to make a filled and 'normal' version I decided for blueberry jam filling - you have to know that my favourite doughnut at Dunkin Donuts is the blueberry crunch doughnut ...

Banana doughnuts with blueberry jam filling

Daring Bakers August Challenge: Ice Cream Petit Fours with Brown Butter Pound Cake

The August 2010 Daring Bakers' challenge was hosted by Elissa of 17 and Baking. For the first time, The Daring Bakers partnered with Sugar High Fridays for a co-event and Elissa was the gracious hostess of both. Using the theme of beurre noisette, or browned butter, Elissa chose to challenge Daring Bakers to make a pound cake to be used in either a Baked Alasa or in Ice Cream Petit Fours. The sources for Elissa's challenge were Gourmet magazine and David Lebovitz's "The Perfect Scoop".

My ice cream machine-buy was no bad idea wasn't it? In this month's challenge I could use it again. The original recipe for the ice cream was vanilla flavour but I decided for cheesecake after tasting some crumbs of this delicious butter pound cake. Unfortunately my boyfriend didn't share my opinion - he doesn't like cheesecake at all and disliked the flavour combination at the first taste. I thought otherwise - I fell in love with it - cannot understand that there are really people who do NOT like cheesecake, the best cake ever ... I decided to go with white chocolate with some coconut shreds in it. The taste was all right, but of course the cake was shining through (should have thought about that before), the petit fours were great anyway (I'm going to post pictures of the ready ones later because I have to head to my mother-in-law...).

Ice Cream Petit Fours (*Butterfinger* style)

Pflaumen-Apfel-Cobbler

Was macht man wenn man einen Korb Pflaumen erstanden hat und einen die Gelüste nach frischen Früchten nach kurzer Zeit verlassen? Kuchen? Pflaumenknödel nach Omas Spezialrezept? Das gab es doch erst letzte Woche bei Mutti .... Nein, gegen die Pflaumenknödel nach Familienrezept ist wirklich nichts einzuwenden. Meine Oma stammt aus dem ehemaligen Sudetenland und hat viele böhmische Rezepte mit in die Familienküche gebracht, so dass wir manchmal nicht nur sächsisch, sondern auch böhmisch gekocht haben. Jedes Jahr zur Hochsaison der Pflaumenzeit lädt meine Mutter zu Pflaumenknödeln ein, und die ganze Familie versammelt sich um einen Tisch. Die Vorbereitungen dazu laufen bereits Tage vorher und die Mengen die meine Mutter dabei produziert grenzen an die Produktion einer mittelgroßen Fabrik - meistens schaffen wir nur die Hälfe von dem, was in den beiden großen Töpfen gedämpft wurde, und einige Exemplare landen zum Glück in der Gefriertruhe, wo man sie bei Gelegenheit wieder hervorzaubern kann. Serviert werden die Knödel mit einer Pflaumentunke, zerlassener Butter und Zimt und Zucker. Ich liebe diese Geschmackskombination. An die zerlassene Butter konnte ich mich zwar nie so richtig gewöhnen, aber von Tunke mit Zucker und Zimt bekam ich nie genug. Die ganze Prozedur der Herstellung ist mir aber zu aufwändig nur für zwei Personen, ganz zu schweigen von den Dingen, die bei der Herstellung alle schief gehen können. Den Geschmack wollte ich aber wieder in einem Gericht erleben, nur was sollte ich machen?

Außerdem waren da auch noch diese Äpfel die dringend weg müssen. Moment, Äpfel, da war doch was - genau, Apfel-Crumble. Funktioniert das auch mit Pflaumen? Kurze Recherche ...  ja, diese ganzen traditionellen englischen Crumble funktionieren mit fast jeder Fruchtkombination; und als Cobbler kann man sie sogar zum Hauptgang servieren.