This is my first time doing Daring Bakers, and it definitely was out of my comfort zone! I had generally overlooked panna cotta as something I wouldn’t really be that interested in. I was completely wrong. We were encouraged to play with flavor combinations, so I layered Bailey’s panna cotta, coffee gelee, and chocolate panna cotta with delicious results.
In addition to the panna cotta, we made Florentine cookies. These were not my favorite cookies on their own, but combined with the panna cotta they were quite delicious.
A word of warning: even with using unsweetened chocolate, the chocolate layer in the panna cotta was almost unbearably rich. This may be remedied by cutting back the sugar or chocolate content, but at this point I would probably just look for another recipe. I’ll let you know if I find one that I like. If you choose to use this chocolate panna cotta recipe, try to keep the portions small.
We had friends over to help us taste test (this made a lot of panna cotta, so four of us only ended up eating half of it). The consensus was that the chocolate was really rich, the Bailey’s panna cotta was good, and the coffee gelee was actually the star of the evening. Put together, the flavors worked very well.
Continue reading Daring Bakers – Panna Cotta and Florentine Cookies