This recipe fit perfectly in it, and was just the right amount for us. Or maybe that's just me. Now, here comes the hard part: whisking the butter in quickly, a bit at a time, so that the sauce emulsifies into a delightfully creamy consistency. Croquembouche is a classic french dessert constructed by piling cream puffs into a pyramid-like tower and drizzling it with caramel sauce that hardens into crunchy strands that look like a fluffy bird’s nest. Watch this video from Fine Cooking which demonstrates how to make the classic French dessert. Twelve homebakers take part in a 'bake off', which will test every aspect of their baking skills as they battle it out to be crowned the Great British Bake Off's Best Amateur Baker. And I don’t just mean that making food for others is a labor of love. So, for all of you risk-takers and over-achievers, here are the ten most difficult recipes to make at home with some references to help you not only finish the dish, but make it a tasty one, too. I bought the cutest little 4.5-cup capacity Bundt® pan to bake smaller cakes for just me and my husband. If you thought making an ice cream cake was hard, try making Baked Alaska. It’s not the what, but the how in terms of combining your ingredients (salt, pepper, egg yolks, butter, shallots, tarragon, and white wine vinegar) for a successful béarnaise. Just read the ingredient list for boeuf bourguignon. Practice makes perfect, but I don't recommend practicing for dinner guests. This is a great recipe when you don't want to wait for the dough to rise. I'm always up for a challenge when it comes to cooking a dish with many, many steps. Then, take your chilled puffed pastry, roll it out and wrap it around the crepe-wrapped tenderloin. This dessert not only requires you to form a mold of ice cream around a cake, but you must also cover it with a meringue, then bake it in the oven. But, real talk? Much like laminated dough, making your own phyllo dough by hand is a royal PITA. After several hours of assembling and freezing, you pour a liquor over the baked meringue and ignite with a flame. Labor Day is the last big event of summer cookout season, and we have plenty of grilling tips, make-ahead recipes, easy sides, no-cook options, and simple party plans. Then, top it with ice cream, stick the whole thing in the freezer to make sure it doesn’t melt, take it out, encase it in a thick layer of whipped meringue, return it to the freezer to make sure it doesn’t melt, and then bake it in the oven. If the sugar syrup isn’t cooked to the right temperature, if the egg whites are too soft or too stiff, or if the combination of the two is overmixed, the meringue will not turn out correctly and your macarons will deflate, along with all of your most treasured hopes and dreams. Get our Béarnaise recipe. 1-Pot Green Curry with Chickpeas, Kale, and Sweet Potato. But fear not! This classic dish involves creating and assembling several rather rich parts to make one over-the-top whole. The easy parts are toasting the English muffin and searing the Canadian bacon or ham, but the difficult parts are poaching two eggs and making a Hollandaise sauce that doesn't break. Baked Alaska, two-thirds of which has to be prepared half a day or more ahead, is making a comeback after about 30 or 40 years, so it seems. It will make this dish much easier to assemble, much like making lasagna with store-bought (rather than homemade) pasta. Prep Time: 20 min. 9. Cook Time: 30 min. The first involves beating sugar, almond meal, and egg whites together into the perfect airy consistency and racing to pipe it onto a baking sheet before it deflates. All it takes is some flour (usually), some chocolate (sometimes), and an empty stomach (obviously). It was the most terrifying experience of my life. My ganache was too runny, the frosting was not thick enough and my cakes were too delicate; I ended up supporting the leaning tower of three cake layers with chopsticks, hoping and praying it would not collapse on my kitchen counter. "Put the flour, baking powder, salt, and three tablespoons of the sugar in a food processor and turn it on long enough to mix the ingredients. To find out more, visit our cookies policy and our privacy policy. Privacy, But, luckily, you can make things much easier by purchasing prepackaged dough so all you're left with is the filling and the meringue. Get the Croquembouche recipe. Sign up for our newsletter to receive the latest tips, tricks, recipes and more, sent twice a week. Like magic, it will puff up in the oven like an omelette on steroids into a beautiful, towering masterpiece that will make your guests ooo and aah. Our Easy Baked Alaska recipe suggests using a blowtorch, instead of the oven, for perfect a dessert every time. But if you want to make like you’re on “The Great British Baking Show,” get King Arthur Flour’s Croissant recipe. Pecan Pie or Pumpkin Pie: Which One Wins Thanksgiving? Then, all three, dishes in their own right, must be layered into a dutch oven, along with cooked sausages, and topped with homemade breadcrumbs before baking for hours, during which time the crust must be broken every half hour to ensure it soaks up enough liquid to create the right consistency. What’s worse, if something you’ve toiled over for hours in the kitchen ends up not turning out quite as well as you’d hoped, well…it can be downright devastating. Remember, egg whites beat best if at room temperature. Since we started the Houston Press, it has been defined as the free, independent voice of Houston, and we would like to keep it that way. Like any other flaky French pastry, croissants are made with laminated dough. The jars must be washed and sanitized, the lids must be heated, and, once filled with jam, the sealed jars must then be processed in a boiling water bath. Pâte à choux is used to create the pastry for eclairs, cream puffs and profiteroles, which are filled, respectively, with custard, pastry cream, and ice cream. Feeling confident? It takes a lot of time and patience to get this technique down, and if you’re short on either, then save yourself the hassle and order your croissants from your local bakery so you can focus on enjoying them. Then make duxelles, which is a mixture of chopped mushrooms cooked with shallots, herbs, and lots of butter. The second, known as Italian meringue, involves slowly and carefully beating a hot sugar syrup into egg whites that have been whipped into soft peaks. Our hardest recipes are perfect for the kitchen thrill seeker—technical challenges that push the limits of one's abilities making labor-intensive but delicious food. It’s one of the most notoriously difficult and time-consuming dishes to make. But, if you don't pack the salt and egg white mixture tight enough, you risk salt crystals leaking into the fish as it cooks and when you break into the shell, creating an almost unbearable flavor.