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 Alaska or in Ice Cream Petit Fours. The sources for Elissa’s challenge were Gourmet magazine and David Lebovitz’s “The Perfect Scoop”.
Of the two options I chose Petit Fours. Of course, I waited until last night to even start which turned out to be an awful idea. For some reason, I was just exhausted this week and aside from rehearsals, I couldn’t really get my motivation up.
The good? They taste ok and I got a nice picture.
The bad? The pound cake was…odd. It wasn’t cake like in how it baked. I’m not sure if that is because I didn’t whip the butter enough, or because I used Splenda for sweetener… Both of these could have been corrected if I had the time.
The ice cream was also a Sugar free creation, and wasn’t terribly ice creamy in behavior. It was like melted, then refrozen ice cream. Not inedible, but not 100% right.
One area where U had plenty of time but no patience was coating the Petit Fours. The ones that were fully coated in chocolate held together well enough, but I had just topped some of the others with the melted chocolate, and when I checked on them an hour later, the tops had slid off to the side. Meh.
At least I got a fairly pretty picture:
So I have learned my lesson; Challenges will get their time and will be done as far in advance as possible. Which means I need to get cracking on my next Daring Cooks assignment.
The Renaissance Woman 
lol. I learned the same lesson…but when mine started to fall apart, I simply refused to let them and ran for the toothpicks to hold them together.
The picture is pretty good, so no worries there 🙂 I am sorry that they didn't taste as good as you were hoping. Hopefully one day you can give it another shot if your schedule opens up a bit – the brown butter cake is delicious. Great job getting the challenge done, though – sometimes finding the time is the biggest part of the challenge!!