Daring Bakers March Challenge

As much as I'm enjoying the Daring Bakers challenges--being part of an online society with secrets is fun!, I'm beginning to suspect that the DBitS (Daring Baker in the Sky, if you recall) might hate me. There is no other explanation for all the time I spend, as an aspiring DBer, worrying about meringue. We saw this with the pavlovas, in particular, but this month is no different. The March challenge was a meringue filled coffee cake. When I saw this, I once again set about scouring the internet for new methods and recipes that just might produce something like that elusive fluff that can only come from the elixer of fetal birds. Finally, I found a few sites advocating the use of soy protein isolate and claiming that a bit of it can be whipped up with some cold water into stiff peaks and then baked on a pie or as meringue cookies. I splurged on all the ingredients to make this enchanting stuff only to be disappointed once again. I should have been more wary when the last comment on the blog was a person who had found her/himself in my position, whipping the protein isolate with water for 10, 15 minutes and having it remain stubbornly bubble-less. *sigh* Since the coffee cake was all ready to be filled at this point, I opted to just skip the meringue step altogether and fill it with sugar, cinnamon, sliced almonds, and chocolate. Had I been as wary as a vegan meringue project really justifies, I would have had a contingency plan of some sort--maybe some ricemallow fluff. Pride goeth before the fall, and all that.

In spite of this failure, the coffee cake was delicious and quite decadent, mostly owing to the high fat content of the cake. I had never made a yeasted coffee cake before. Coffee cakes, in my family's culinary lexicon, are quick bread sorts of things with a streusel-like topping. This yeasted coffee cake was actually very similar to the stollen from December. You make a rich dough, let it rise, fill it, roll it up, shape it into a wreath, let it rise again, and bake it off. Again, I'm not including the recipe here because I pretty much just veganized the one listed in the Daring Bakers instructions. If you are dying to make a rolled, yeasted coffee cake and think you can best me on the meringue step, by all means message me, and I'll share it. I am easily bested.