Bolo de Leite Condensado: Brazilian Condensed Milk Cake

 

Reaching into the larder for a tin of Carnation caramel recently, I grabbed a tin of Carnation condensed milk and only realised when I’d taken the lid off. Oops! So I needed to find a recipe to use the condensed milk.

 

 

Luckily, I was also looking for a Brazilian recipe for the next round of Formula 1 Foods, and happened across this recipe for condensed milk cake – bolo de leite condensado. Perfect!

 

Unfortunately, I didn’t like the cake all that much. It had quite a rubbery texture – I couldn’t entirely tell if this was from the condensed milk as it almost looked undercooked, but in fact I had to bake it for a lot longer than the 40 minutes the recipe instructed – it was in the oven for 1 hour 10 minutes, as even after an hour it wasn’t cooked through. There are a couple of comments on the website for this recipe, one of which says it took 90 minutes to cook and wasn’t great, but two other comments saying the cake is lovely if a bit too sweet and you could reduce the amount of sugar. So take from that what you will – I for one won’t be making this cake again, but since I went to all the effort (and I need a Brazilian entry for Formula 1 Foods) I am sharing it with you anyway.

 

 

You can read the full recipe here: the steps are very simple but as I said I would disagree with the cooking time and think it needs at least 70 minutes and perhaps it does need 90.

 

It does look very pretty when it comes out of the oven though!

 

 As I didn’t like the texture, I didn’t take it into work as planned, but also didn’t want to waste it. So I decided to try it as a hot dessert with custard which was a bit better!

I'm sharing this with Formula 1 Foods, the blog challenge I host, as the next race is in Brazil.

I also co-host Alphabakes with Ros of The More Than Occasional Baker and the letter she has chosen this month is M so I'm sending in this condensed milk cake.

 

Pionono Dulce de Leche

As the World Cup is taking place at the moment I have been looking for recipes from the different nations taking part. I looked on Google for Argentinian recipes and found Pionono Dulce de Leche, a kind of Swiss roll with a caramel filling, which I thought looked really nice.

In the past I've bought a tin of Carnation Dulce de Leche when I've needed it for a recipe, but my small local supermarkets don't stock it. They only have condensed milk, but I discovered from the internet that you can actually make your own Dulce de Leche from condensed milk - all you really need to do is cook it until it thickens.

There are various ways to do it. There is the oven method: pour the tin of condensed milk into an oven proof dish and cover it with foil, then place that dish in a roasting tray and pour in hot water so it comes half way up the side of the pan. Bake it at 200C for anywhere between an hour and an hour and a half, topping up the water if necessary. 

The pan method: take the label off the tin and use a corkscrew or similar to make three holes in the top of the can, spaced evenly apart. Put the tin in a saucepan and fill with water three quarters of the way up the sides of the can. Bring to the boil then simmer for 4 hours. Allow to cool before opening the tin.

The microwave method: this is what I did as it is by far the quickest, though you will get a more lumpy texture; it's fine once you whisk it though. Pour the condensed milk into a microwave-proof dish and cover with cling film, then cook on medium for 2 minutes at a time, stirring each time, until the mixture has thickened - I found it took about 8 minutes but it will depend on the power of your microwave.

I used a recipe from About.com for the cake. I didn't make the caramel frosting though due to lack of time. I also didn't have any cream so rather than mixing the dulce de leche with cream for the filling, I used it as it was.

You need:
4 eggs, separated
3/4 cup caster sugar
1 tsp vanilla
1/2 tsp almond extract
3/4 cup plain flour
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp baking powder
3/4 cup dulce de leche

Line a Swiss roll pan with greaseproof paper and preheat the oven to 180C. Separate the eggs and whip the egg whites in a bowl until you have soft peaks. Add 1/4 cup of the sugar to the egg whites and beat until stiff peaks form. In another bowl, beat the egg yolks with the remaining sugar until pale and tripled in volume. Add the vanilla. Fold the dry ingredients into the egg yolk mixture then fold in the egg whites. Spread into the Swiss roll tin.

Bake for 10 minutes then turn out the cake onto a clean tea towel or another piece of greaseproof paper and peel off the greaseproof paper from the back of the cake.

Allow to cool, then unroll, spread with the dulce de leche and roll back up.

 Slice to serve. I left mine a bit too long before I tried to roll it up so it broke up a bit! It tasted good though I found the cake part had a slightly grainy texture I assume from the ground almonds and next time I would be tempted to leave that out and use more flour. The homemade dulce de leche was very good!

The letter I have chosen for Alphabakes this month is D, and since dulce de leche is the main ingredient in this cake I am including it in the roundup.

I'm also sending this to Chris at Cooking Around the World for his World Cup blogging challenge.

Yema (Custard Candy)

We are coming to the end of the alphabet for the Alphabakes challenge and there are only a few letters left - which seem to be the hard ones! My co-host Ros has chosen the letter Y this month and I immediately thought of yogurt - which I think will be most people's entry this month! So I wanted to see if I could find something a bit different, and after a little Googling came up with ..... yema.

Yema is a traditional Filipino sweet made from condensed milk and egg yolks, and sometimes flavoured with crushed peanuts. I used this recipe that I found online; it only uses two ingredients, condensed milk and egg yolks. It didn't give a size for the tin of condensed milk so I did this a little through trial and error. I had three quarters of a tin of condensed milk in the fridge left over from another recipe, which would be about 300g. I initially used three egg yolks then added a fourth.

The recipe I used told me to heat the condensed milk and egg yolks in a bain marie, but no matter how long I boiled the water for, the mixture would not thicken, even after I added the fourth egg yolk. So I transferred the mixture straight to a saucepan and brought it back to the boil, stirring, and found it thickened very quickly.

 

When the mixture was really stodgy I left it to cool and then rolled small balls of the mixture.

I decided not to add any other flavours like crushed peanuts but I did want to jazz the sweets up a little bit. I had a container of yellow and orange sprinkles in the cupboard with different sections and I used the remainder of it up for this recipe. I poured the sprinkles into a bowl and rolled the yema in it, then refridgerated them overnight.

These were incredibly sweet but pretty good - you wouldn't want to eat more than one at a time but they are easy to make and fun as well. And it's definitely an unusual Y entry for Alphabakes!

Masterchef Chocolate Crunch Dessert

A little while ago I won a cookery book in a Rafflecopter competition - the Masterchef Kitchen Bible. This is the first recipe I've made from it - it's actually called Rice Krispie Cake with Chocolate Mousse, Cherry Sorbet and Cherries in Kirsch - but I left out the cherries because I don't like them and didn't make the sorbet either as I wanted this to be a fairly quick and easy dessert. So I'm calling it Chocolate Crunch Dessert!

Serves 2
You need:
For the base:
50g dark chocolate
30g Rice Krispies
1 tbsp golden syrup
100g condensed milk
For the mousse:
75g dark chocolate
2 eggs
100ml double cream

Melt the chocolate and stir in the Rice Krispies. This takes me back a bit!

Stir in the syrup and condensed milk.

Spoon into the base of individual serving dishes and leave aside to set - but don't put in the fridge or they will set too hard.

So far it's just like a Rice Krispie cake...

Separate the eggs. Melt the chocolate for the mousse, and stir in the egg yolks.

Whip the cream - doesn't this look tempting?

Then beat the egg whites until stiff (in a separate bowl with a clean beater)

Gently fold the cream then the egg whites into the chocolate mixture to make a lovely mousse

Spoon the mousse into the serving glasses on top of the Rice Krispie mixture.

This was a lovely dessert; you could jazz it up with the cherry sorbet and kirsch or even add a shot of liqueur (I would recommend Chambord Black Raspberry liqueur) to the mousse for a more 'adult' dessert. But my boyfriend and I enjoyed this just as it is!

I'm sending this to Tea Time Treats, hosted by Karen of Lavender and Lovage and Kate of What Kate Baked, as the challenge this month is to make a chilled dessert.

Key Lime Cheesecake

My name is Caroline and I'm a cheesecake addict!

When I saw the letter for this month's Alphabakes was K, I immediately thought of key lime pie. Then I got a new recipe book for my birthday called Cheesecake, by Hannah Miles, and when I found a recipe in it for key lime pie cheesecake, I decided to make this instead.

I adapted it slightly from the recipe so to make my version you need:
300g digestive biscuits
100g butter
4 limes
300g cream cheese
300g Quark
397g tin condensed milk

First crush the biscuits - I find it easiest to do this in a food processor.

Fine biscuit crumbs

Melt the butter and stir in the biscuits

I also had the chance to use another birthday present for this recipe - my friend Jane gave me a springform cake tin with a glass-bottomed base, which is a great idea as you can serve your cake or cheesecake on the base and it looks like a glass plate.

It also comes with a thin plastic spatula which is for loosening your cake around the edges, so you don't scratch the tin with a knife. It's made by a company called Pampered Chef and I'd definitely recommend it.

Press the buttery biscuit crumbs into the base of your cake tin and bake at 180C for about ten minutes.

Finely grate the zest of two limes, and juice all four.

Mix the cream cheese and Quark in a large bowl

Add the condensed milk, lime zest and juice and mix well

Here's the cheesecake mixture

 Spoon onto the biscuit base and smooth over the top.

The recipe in the book suggested making candied lime peel to decorate then piping whipped cream on the top. I decided the extra cream was a calorific step too far, but I did try to make the candied lime peel. However I got sidetracked by something else and when I returned to the pan it had burnt! I had to think of another way to decorate the top as it did look quite plain, and remembered I had this tub of neon sugar that Dr. Oetker had recently sent me to review. It comes with four colours and I decided the neon green looked like lime and would work well on top.

The tub has four separate openings so you can use one colour at a time. After a few hours on top of the cheesecake the colour from the strands did start to run, but I put that down to the wetness of the cheesecake- I think these would be quite good on top of cupcakes.

Here are the sugar strands sprinkled over the cheesecake

After it was removed from the tin

The cheesecake tasted lovely with a zingy lime flavour that was noticeable but not overpowering.

I'm sending this to Alphabakes, the blog challenge that I am hosting this month, as the letter we have chosen is K. I actually had to look up the difference between key limes and normal limes, and I'm not sure which I used- the only kind the supermarket had! I also noticed that while the recipe was called key lime cheesecake it didn't actually specify in the ingredients list to use key limes, just limes. I think key lime might have become generally accepted as the name of a lot of lime desserts, whether key limes are used or not!