The Return to Daring Baking

The February 2011 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Mallory from A Sofa in the Kitchen. She chose to challenge everyone to make Panna Cotta from a Giada De Laurentiis recipe and Nestle Florentine Cookies.

Well I have had quite a while off from Daring Baking- the easiest way to word my hiatus is to say that life got in the way. And when I finally returned, what did I get? Panna Cotta. Oh dear.

I'm vegetarian so have stayed away from anything with gelatine in it and have also bloused out from gelatine substitutes but my pride wouldn't let me take a pass on my first month back the the bakers so I just had to do it and I must say, I think it was a bit of a fail. Don't get me wrong, the flavour was great and the texture was smooth and creamy but, due to insufficient experimentation with galtin substitutes, my panna cotta, although firm, would not hold its own shape. Consequently, I got all snitty and didn't take as good photos as I could have.

The florentine went better but took a bit of experimentation to find just the right amount of time to cook them so they were an relatively even brown and not just brown at the edges (I was worried about them burning) because if they don't brown all the way across the buscuit, all you have a floppy florentines.

So. The panna cottta. I made a vanilla one with a mixed berry gelee and used Xanthan Gum instead of gelatine because I am vegetarian.

This was my great innovative presentation idea which failed abysmally. I put shot glasses inside poaching cups and poured the panna cotta around it. The intention was to pull the shots glasses out once the panna cotta had set and put in the berry gelee. Unfortunately my panna cotta didn't set enough so when I pulled the shot glass out, it all just kinda slopped in on itself. Very demoralising.

And so I pinned all my hopes on the florentines. These turned out to be trickier than I had expected. I'm glad the mixture makes to many because it took me several goes to work out exactly how long they had to cook to set properly. It seems it really is very important that they are brown all the way through but it's a fine line between that and burning. The ones below are an example of my first ones- these aren't cooked enough to set properly.

This is what they had to look like to set properly.

I draped some over a rolling pin to curve them.

Curved Florentines drizzled with dark chocoalte.

Flat versions also covered in dark chocolate. These are amazingly addictive!