April 2013 Daring Bakers Challenge: Savarin

This month's Daring Bakers challenge was to make a savarin, which is a yeast-based cake. I'd never heard of this kind of cake and was anxious to give it a try.

The savarin began much as many of my bread recipes do ... by creating a yeast-based sponge. After letting it come to life, the sponge was incorporated into the remaining ingredients and left to rise. Fortunately for me, I had a very good supervisor (aka Conor) who oversaw much of the process. After creating the dough, I was instructed to poke a hole in the middle of the dough and then place it in a savarin pan, I used my standard bundt pan and think it worked grand and dandy. My dough never puffed up to the top of the pan, like the instructions indicated, but, again, I don't think that made a big difference.

As the cake baked, I made the pastry cream (YUM). I also made the flavored soaking syrup. This is where I deviated from the original recipe a bit.The original recipe called for peach tea and peach syrup, neither of which were in our pantry. Instead, I used the kiwi liquor that Eric and I bought in New Zealand back in 2003 but had never opened. Of course, we had to sample it before using it in the recipe. My, but that stuff was tasty!!

After the cake was done baking, I let it cool and decided to follow the recipe's suggestion of letting it dry out a bit so it could soak up more of the syrup. Unfortunately, I think I let it dry out too much. The final product was a bit on the dry side. On an up note, the lemon zest added to the pastry cream was amazing!

Sponge

Working the sponge into the dough

My manager

Mixin, mixin, mixin

Nothing gets past this guy!

Dough ready for the pan

Rising complete, ready for the oven

YUM

Annika and Conor modeling the final savarin

Savarin

Natalia of Gatti Fili e Farina challenges us to make a traditional Savarin, complete with soaking syrup and cream filling! We were to follow the Savarin recipe but were allowed to be creative with the soaking syrup and filling, allowing us to come up with some very delicious cakes!