August Daring Bakers Challenge-Brown Butter Pound Cake into Baked Alaska & Ice Cream Petit Fours

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”.

This was a fun challenge.  I really enjoyed learning how to brown butter.  I hadn't even heard of such a thing and now I'm in LOVE.  I may just brown butter EVERY time I use it :) 


You can find the complete recipe here on the Daring Kitchen website.

I chose to make the Baked Alaska and then use the remnants of the brown butter pound cake to make the ice cream petit fours.

For the Baked Alaska I used Tartelette's Coconut Cherry Ice Cream (same that I used last month).  But again I did not infuse with rose buds and this time I substituted all of the dairy for coconut milk (3 cups of coconut milk).  I was worried that it would be overpoweringly coconut flavored but it wasn't.  And as I mixed the ice cream every half hour I was worried it wouldn't work out as the coconut milk kept separating.  But alas, it didn't separate too much and the ice cream tasted great.

The baked Alaska turned out wonderful.   A cute little hedgehog :)

I then took the last bit of brown butter pound cake and made ice cream petit fours.  For those I made Cheesecake Ice Cream (found on Tartelette's website as well).  They didn't look very good because I was too impatient for the ganache to thicken up--so I didn't take a picture but you can be assured that they tasted HEAVENLY!!