The December 2009 Daring Bakers’ challenge was brought to you by Anna of Very Small Anna and Y of Lemonpi. They chose to challenge Daring Bakers’ everywhere to bake and assemble a gingerbread house from scratch. They chose recipes from Good Housekeeping and from The Great Scandinavian Baking Book as the challenge recipes.

When I discovered that December’s Daring Bakers challenge was to make a gingerbread house, I was thrilled!  I’ve wanted to make a gingerbread house for years and I’d actually planned to make one with Lucas this year.  (Admittedly I was going to buy Lucas a kit from IKEA for insant gratification!)

After much admiring of gingerbread houses on flickr I settled on using a pattern from Ultimate Gingerbread.  I splashed out on their Pearl House pattern, purely because it looked like my dream house!  Doesn’t everyone want a house with a turret?!?  Extravagant (and completely unnecessary), I know.  I printed off the pattern pieces and then invested a happy half an hour for sticking them to card and cutting them out.

I chose to use the recipe that Y posted from Scandinavian Baking by Beatrice Ojakangas (recipe available on Y’s site). I own this book, so it was very handy to be able to take a book into the kitchen.  I did modify it ever so slightly by adding 110g of light brown sugar for sweetness as a lot of people had complained it wasn’t tasty, and I also used 2tsp of ground cloves instead of 3tsp.  The dough wasn’t quite as fragrant, but it did mean that it was more kid-friendly. Cloves are quite fierce and I wasn’t sure that Lucas would appreciate them as much as me!

Despite reports of dry, troublesome dough on the Daring Bakers forum, I had no problems with the dough.  All three batches came together easily; it was supple and easy to handle; and it smelled and tasted great.  I chose to roll out the dough between sheets of clingfilm before chilling since it was butter-rich and bound to set up like a rock!  This also sped up cutting out the pieces of the house, all eleventy million of them!

It was only when I started cutting out the pieces that I realised how huge this house was going to be!!  I’d paid scant attention to the measurements when I’d cut out all the template pieces and now it was too late to shrink it down!  I was sorely tempted to downsize but decided to persevere in the end; I could always invite people over to eat it!

The first pieces to be cut and baked were those for the main roof and porch roof.  I then made small cardboard moulds, a bit bigger than the trimmed pieces, and assembled the cap roofs, using a heck of a lot of royal icing that I had left over from the sparkling snowflake cake.  Baking the rest of the pieces took ages.  I was beginning to lose the will to live when I suddenly realised that I was done. Hooray!  I then crushed up an entire bag of Fox’s Glacier Mints and used them to create clear ‘glass’ windows in the house.  The double-baking of the main walls made me feel a lot more comfortable about constructing the house later on!!

Compared to the tedium of baking loads of small pieces, decorating hardly took any time.  I did most of it on Monday when we found ourselves snowed/iced in.

I copied shamelessly from the sample pictures provided by Ultimate Gingerbread and piped pale pink royal icing siding on to my house.  Each window had white frames piped on and an evergreen garland underneath.  Shiny silver balls were dotted on to the upper corners of the frames which looked very pretty.  Finally I piped a gorgeous wreath on the front door and left everything to dry overnight.

Construction day dawned and I procrastinated like mad.  It just seemed too difficult, despite my earlier practice with the IKEA house!  I finally sucked it up and made a batch of white royal icing.

After laying out the main walls on my board (A1 foamcore sheet!), I piped a heavy bead of royal icing all around the bottom edge and the joining sides.  Then I stood up the back wall and propped it upright, inside and out, with a can.  From there, it was easy to get the remaining walls up and stuck properly.  I only left a can against them for five minutes and then they were stuck fast.  I reinforced the seams with plenty more royal icing and then moved on to making the bay window, then the leaning turret, and finally the right extension.  I let it dry overnight before enlisting Dave’s help to get the rooves on.

After all that, it just took an hour to ice the roofs and dress the board.  I wanted to make a little cluster of Christmas trees but I ran out of green royal icing so you can just see last year’s Christmas tree, planted out in the garden by the house’s occupants.  Dessicated coconut sprinkled over a smear of royal icing makes the snow look convincing, and I finished off by piping garlands around the porch supports and using flattened Jelly Tots as a welcome mat on the porch.  (Every gingerbread house needs some sweets, right?)

I want to say a BIG thank-you to Anna and Y for this fantastic challenge!  I had loads of fun making my house and I hope everyone else did too!

When Ivonne and Lis first asked me to host August’s Daring Bakers’ challenge, I was thrilled. Then intimidated.  And then the fun megalomania kicked in.   I could choose anything!  I could be as nice or as evil as I wanted to be!  Bwahahahaha!

Ahem.

I’ve always had a long list of things that I’ve wanted to bake.  Well, things I want to eat, really—so this seemed the perfect time to knock something off that list.  But choosing something that would be appropriate for the Daring Bakers turned out to be harder than I expected.  I was quite gung-ho about strudel, but then the next challenge turned out to be strudel!  And then I thought of making a Fraisier but that particular cake cannot be chilled because of the marzipan on top.  Same problem with the amazing Triumph of Gluttony from Sicily!   I was beginning to run out of ideas—crocquembouche? No, we’d already done eclairs and general fun with choux last year—when I came across a beautifully layered cake with stripes that a zebra would be proud of.  The Dobos Torta.

Whisper-thin layers of sponge, a decadent chocolate buttercream and crisp wedges of caramel on top… this was my kind of cake!  And best of all, it fit with all the very sensible criteria for a Daring Bakers recipe, as well as being daring and thoroughly challenging.

Once I’d settled on what I wanted to make, and quickly checked with Ivonne that no one else was planning to challenge us with it, I started thinking about a co-host.  Very little thought was needed before I asked the lovely Lorraine of Not Quite Nigella if she would like to join me.  Thankfully she said yes, and the rest is (now) history.

I have loved looking at all the wonderful Dobos Torta that the very Daring Bakers have created through August.  Looking at cake upon cake while dieting probably isn’t the best idea, but it’s just been so much fun to see so many different shapes, colours and designs.  I feel like a proud mama when I see another new work of culinary art appear on the DB Forum and I am so, so pleased that everyone has taken on this cake with such gusto.  I really think that The Daring Bakers have outdone themselves this month!  Bravo to you all!

The full recipe is below, and please check out all the amazing Dobos Torta via the Daring Bakers’ blogroll.

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Well, here I am.  A day late, but hopefully not a dollar short.  I totally spaced on this month’s Daring Cooks challenge.  I managed to convince myself that the posting date was the 17th and it was only when I saw dumplings popping up on my Google Reader, like a bloom of jellyfish, that it dawned on me that I was late.

“I’m late, I’m late!  For a very important date!” said I, channelling the White Rabbit, and promptly scurried off to the supermarket for supplies.

This month’s Daring Cooks challenge was hosted by the lovely Jen from Use Real Butter and is Chinese dumplings.

Chinese dumplings can be boiled, steamed, or fried.  I am a big fan of frying them to create potstickers as you get the best of two worlds: a gorgeous golden crispy base and a softly steamed upper half.  Mmm… magical.

So after practically throwing Lucas into bed, I got into the kitchen and started chopping.  And chopping.  And chopping.  Half-way through the ingredients list for the pork filling I found myself coming up with bad puns about chopping sprees.  (According to Jen, you have to chop by hand as a food processor creates either mush or irregularly chopped pieces of vegetable.  My knife callus bears testament to my determination to have finely minced veggies in my filling.)

Making the dough was easy enough since I happily used the food procesor for that.  Rolling the dough into decently thin circles was the hardest part for me.  Try as I might, I just couldn’t turn out a perfect circle which then had a knock-on effect with my pleating.  And as we all know, the real art of Chinese dumplings comes from the pleats that give them their trademark crescent shape.  *sigh*  Still, the later ones looked much prettier than my first attempts, so at least I improved.

I actually finished making a batch of the dumplings last night, but managed to burn them all.  I don’t mean a few blackened speckles… I mean solid black bottoms.  I was so dispirited that I (a) didn’t want to take a photo of such tragic dumplings and (b) couldn’t be bothered rolling and filling the other half of the dough so I left that for this morning and attempted to make some with Lucas.  Suffice to say that my dreams of having a dumpling production line in my kitchen have been dashed.  He did have great fun squidging the pork filling and poking at the already shaped dumplings, though!

When I finally finished filling all the dumplings, I shoved two-thirds of them into the freezer for Dave and very, very carefully fried the rest for lunch.  Lucas loved the huge plume of steam that shot out of the pan when I poured in the cold water and couldn’t wait to try the potstickers.  Heck, neither could I.  They smelled so good!

As good as they smelled, the potstickers tasted even better!  I knew I was on to a winner when I flipped one over and it was gorgeously golden brown with an audibly crispy base.  Mmmm… crunchy.  The filling was smooth, fresh and very fragrant with beautifully chopped vegetables, even if I do say so myself!  The best thing is that Lucas loved them, and he’s been a little fussy in his eating habits lately, except where chocolate is concerned of course.  He’s not stupid!  At any rate, he demolished a plateful of potstickers with plenty of “dip-dip” and tried to steal some of mine!   I suspect that my near-future involves making lots of dumplings…

For the recipe and fabulous step-by-step photographs, see Jen’s post here.  Thanks for a great challenge, Jen!

“Nun, meine Kinder,” Frau Mieders said, beaming on them, “today we make the puddings for Mittagessen. And for the puddings , they are Apfelstrudel.”

The girls beamed back at her upon hearing this. Apfelstrudel was a favourite pudding with everyone at school. *

I grew up on a steady diet of school stories, loving their sheer escapism and wishing that my school was more inclusive and accepting.  By far, my favourite was The Chalet School series by Elinor M. Brent-Dyer—now there’s a mouthful of a name for you!  The Chalet School was a wonderful place, full of titbits of knowledge about languages as the girls had to speak English, French and German on alternate days (with Sunday being a ’speak your own’ day), and there were always thrilling adventures around every corner!

One of the most memorable aspects of the Chalet School books was the food.  Oh, how wonderful the food always sounded!  Even the names of mealtimes were different: Frühstück , Mittagssen, Abenssen.  And there were always such vast quantities of food.  When Miss Ferrars joined the Chalet School her first meal consisted of creamy soup sprinkled with herbs, followed by veal in a picquant sauce and then a huge hollow bun stuffed with jam and cream…and that was just for lunch!  Breakfast by contrast was simple with rolls, honey and fruit, all washed down with milk or milky coffee.  I think the coffee was what sealed the deal for me… I wasn’t allowed to drink coffee as a little ‘un, and it seemed so grown-up!  And the girls always, always had afternoon tea or Kaffee und Kuchen (coffee and cakes) which always sounded luscious!

And so it was that the Chalet School was my first introduction to apple strudel, or apfelstrudel to give it its proper name.  Making my own strudel has always been something that I’ve wanted to do, so imagine my delight when I saw that this month’s Daring Bakers’ challenge was to be strudel! The May Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Linda of make life sweeter! and Courtney of Coco Cooks. They chose Apple Strudel from the recipe book Kaffeehaus: Exquisite Desserts from the Classic Cafés of Vienna, Budapest and Prague by Rick Rodgers.

The first thing to do when making strudel is to make your dough.  Frau Mieders, the plump and jolly Domestic Science mistress in the Chalet School books, always bade her pupils gather all the necessary ingredients before beginning work.  So, in a bid to be a good Chalet girl—something that was always the “ideal” to strive towards in the books—I followed her wisdom.

In Frau Mieders eyes I undoubtedly fell at the first hurdle by using my food processor to make the strudel dough. She says on a number of occasions that “cookery is not for idle girls”!  however, the food processor is a great way to make strudel dough as it encourages long strands of gluten to form in the dough which is exactly what you want for stretching it out to paper-thinness.

Hopefully I redeemed myself by kneading by hand until all traces of stickiness were gone and the dough was incredibly elastic.  I can highly recommend hurling the dough at the unfloured worktop at least a hundred times!  Not only is it fun, it also develops the gluten further and faster than just kneading alone.

With the dough resting, it was time to gather together the filling ingredients and set to work on that.

“Peel, core and slice the apples,” the mistress said.  “Peel thinly, please and also slice thinly.” [...] And then Frau Miediers caused consternation among them by announcing that she was coming round to see how thinly they were all peeling and slicing.

Frau Miediers would be horrified at my idea of peeling apples!  I absolutely loathe doing it, so I try to get it over and done with quickly and end up with very thick peelings.  Still, it was slightly less arduous than usual as I was so excited at the prospect of strudel!

I made a couple of small tweaks to the filling recipe, which I would probably roll back for next time.  I used challah for the breadcrumbs as I’d baked one a few days previously and the rich crumbs browned awfully fast when I fried them.  Plain white bread would definitely be best, I think.  I also tripled the cinnamon called for, which made the filling mixture awfully brown.  Oh, and as I don’t particularly like walnuts, I used flaked almonds which I adore.

The dough had to be uncovered and placed on the floured cloth and first rolled out and then stretched on the backs of their hands until it was almost wafer-thin and transparent and fitted the cloth exactly.  There must be no breaks in it and this made it worse.

I made a double-batch of the strudel pastry as I was pretty sure that I’d either poke a hole through it, or it would stick fast to the sheet, and I’m really glad I did.  It was still a little sticky when I tried to roll it onto the sheet and then when I resorted to just stretching it out, holes kept appearing until it looked like aged lace.  So I tossed it away and started again with the second half.  What really made a difference was brushing the top of the dough with melted butter and also buttering the rolling pin.  It stretched out like a dream and you could definitely read through it!

“And now,” said the mistress when the apples, sugar, raisins and currants had all been placed on the pastry.  “We roll him into a long, thin sausage—this way!”  And she took two corners of the cloth in each hand and deftly rolled it up.  “Now you try it.”

The less said about the shape of some of those sausages, the better!  Some were twice the size and more of Ruey’s.  Some were thick at one end and thin at the other. Primrose Trevoase cleverly rolled her cloth in with the filling and had to undo it, find a fresh cloth for herself and stand to one side, looking rather silly, while Frau Miediers transferred the remarkable result to the new cloth.

This was the part I was dreading.  Even though I had liberally covered the sheet with flour, I could totally see everything going wrong when I rolled up the strudel.  Interestingly enough, did you know that strudel means whirlpool in old German?  The name comes from the rolling or whirling action when you finally get brave enough to just do it.

And would you believe it? Nothing went wrong!  The pastry was so incredibly thin that you could see each slice of apple ghost-like underneath the layers.  Beautiful.

The last touch was to brush them over with melted butter.  After that, each sausage must be carefully bent in the middle and put on well-greased baking sheets before being slipped into the big ovens to bake till they were golden-brown.

I can’t say that I managed to bend the strudel into quite the right shape, but it all fitted on the baking sheet which was a relief.  My only problem came during baking the strudel…

I liberally daubed the strudel with melted butter, so much so that there were a few little puddles on the baking sheet, which then started to smoke in the oven.  I’d say I was about two minutes away from a flaming strudel.  Whoops!  So after whipping the strudel out of the oven and drying it and the parchment, I bunged it back in and hoped for the best.  Which explains why my strudel is a tad over-browned.

Still, once I stopped grousing about it and actually cut a slice, I felt redeemed.  (Well, I got the third slice.  Lucas was sitting at the dining table waiting for the first slice while I was photographing the whole thing, and then Dave came downstairs for his slice, and *sigh*)  The pastry was so incredibly light and its plainness provided the perfect foil for the gorgeously soft spiced apples.  I served the first few plates Chalet School style with “a positive featherbed of whipped cream” and the remainder was eaten with some vanilla ice-cream.

I’m so pleased that I have finally fulfilled a childhood dream and made my own strudel.  It was definitely worth all the work and I’ll be making plenty more strudels in the future.  (I’m thinking that a savoury one with roasted squash and dolcelatte cheese would be awesome in the autumn….

Thanks so much, Linda and Courtney for this wonderful challenge!

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Ever since Ivonne and Lis announced that they were forming a Daring Cooks’ group, I’ve been eagerly awaiting the first challenge recipe.  And I was not to be disappointed: the doyennes of The Daring Kitchen had chosen ricotta gnocchi from The Zuni Café Cookbook by Judy Rodgers.

Gnocchi are my Achilles heel.  I love them to bits, but whenever I’ve tried making them, it has been somewhat disastrous.  I remember trying to make butternut squash gnocchi when I was pregnant, only for my nice neat gnocchi to completely disintegrate when they went into the simmering water.  I kid you not.  It looked like I’d made soup and all I could do was stand there and cry big fat tears into the pan.

My next fearful foray into gnocchi was making potato gnocchi to go with a beef goulash from a Gary Rhodes recipe.  Everything would have been fine, I’m sure, if I had cooked them immediately after shaping, but I was trying to do everything in advance as it was for a Hogmany dinner. *sigh* They didn’t disintegrate but were rather gluey.  Okay, very gluey.

So, when I set out to make the challenge recipe, I made damn sure that I’d read the recipe at least three times and watched every YouTube video I could find on the subject of ricotta gnocchi.  Oh, yeah… I’d never eaten ricotta gnocchi before, either, so had no idea what the texture should be like.  Still, many years of enthusiastic eating have qualified me to say what is tasty and what is not!

I decided to go the whole hog and make my own ricotta for a couple of reasons.  Firstly, the supermarket ricotta I buy is very, very wet and I didn’t think it would drain enough and secondly, I had everything I needed to make the ricotta and thought it would be fun!  And it was both fun and really, really easy.  I would totally do it again as it’s much cheaper than buying a tub of ricotta, plus it tasted better.

When I (very nervously) came to make my gnocchi it turned out that I had nothing to worry about.  My ricotta was bone dry and it easily whipped up into a thick, but fluffy batter.  The only thing that went wrong—because something always has to go wrong when I do gnocchi, right?—was that my beloved microplane grater somehow snapped in half when I was grating the Parmesan and I grated a little bit of myself in the ensuing panic.  Am I the only person to have ever broken a microplane like that?  I thought those things were indestructible!

I made rough quenelles of the batter and dropped them into a shallow bowl of flour to shape them.  After the first couple, I got brave and just quickly patted little spoonfuls of batter between my floured hands to shape the gnocchi.  This was far less sticky than previous efforts.  Yay!

The recipe calls for making and cooking a test gnocchi which is such an awesome idea!  I wish I’d thought of that years ago and saved myself many a tear.  Interestingly, the little lumps and bumps of each gnocchi smooth out during the cooking process and each gnocchi almost doubles in size which makes this a great recipe for greedy people like me.  I was also quite fascinated to note how each gnocchi rose from the bottom of the pan in the exact order they’d been dropped into the simmering water.  It was like a scene from Fantasia!

As I’d never tasted ricotta gnocchi before, I decided to keep things very simple and just make a thick tomato sauce to go with them.  I wanted to be able to taste the unadulturated flavour of the gnocchi before dipping into a familiar and comforting sauce.

I’m very pleased to say that this first Daring Cooks’ challenge managed to exorcise the ghosts of gnocchi past.  My gnocchi cooked up into pillowy clouds of ricotta goodness and both Dave and I loved them.  Lucas was less keen, but I didn’t care as that meant there was more for me!  Hooray!

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It’s that time of the month again… Daring Bakers time!

The April 2009 challenge is hosted by Jenny from Jenny Bakes. She has chosen Abbey’s Infamous Cheesecake as the challenge.

As much as I love seeing what all the hundreds of Daring Bakers can do with exactly the same recipe, I have a real soft spot for our more creative challenges… where we can pretty much do what we like.  They have an exciting, last day of term feel to them.

I make cheesecake quite frequently, so I wanted to try and do something different with the decoration.  (I should probably confess that my idea of decorating a cheesecake is piling a few truffles in the centre!)  Jenny mentioned in her challenge announcement that we should “make it unique, make a showstopper of a dessert” so that’s what I tried to do.

Originally I wanted to wrap a vanilla-bean laced cheesecake with some white chocolate plastic and piling the centre high with fresh and chocolate-dipped strawberries.  But… it isn’t strawberry season yet, and the few berries I’ve pinched from Lucas have been a bit watery, so I just couldn’t.

So, it was time for Plan B, for which we need a little background.

I am a real coffee-lover.  So much so that I have to ration myself.  Case in point: the last time I bought a bag of coffee, I disappeared into a week-long high and drank jugfuls upon jugfuls of cold-filtered coffee.  (If you have slightly more self-control than me, then you can find the method over at Smitten Kitchen.)

But all good things must come to an end, and now our coffee machine sits on top of the larder (no space on the worktops) and apart from that week when I buzzed around like a hummingbird on crack, the only coffee in the house has been the Visitors’ Jar of instant coffee.

Deciding to make a cappuccino cheesecake was therefore a risky move, but if it tasted as wonderful as I expected it to, then it would be totally worth it.  Plus, bouncing off the walls was bound to burn off all the calories from the cheesecake!

To make the cheesecake look even more special, I decided to wrap the cheesecake in chocolate plastic.  This… did not go well.  Maybe I didn’t manage to scrape all the liquid glucose into the melted chocolate, or perhaps I cooked the chocolate too much, but the but instead of ending up with a pliable and slightly sticky ball of chocolate, I got chocolate crumbs.  No matter what I did, I just couldn’t rescue matters, so I wound up wrapping the cheesecake in some chocolate sugarpaste that I had lying around.  It didn’t turn out as whisper-thin as I’d hoped, but it still looked and tasted pretty damn good.

Since I was playing dress-up with the cheesecake, I added some little gold buttons and some seam details before completing the cappuccino effect with a dusting of cocoa powder.  Oh, and because I couldn’t resist gilding the lily, I made some fanciful sugarpaste flowers,

In case you couldn’t tell, I was really pleased with the cheesecake and it tasted almost as good as it looked.  The coffee flavour of the actual cheeesecake was great, and the whipped cream really made the frothy, extravagant cappuccino effect work.  I’ve got to say, this isn’t my favourite cheesecake recipe ever.  I know that lots of Daring Bakers loved it, but I just liked it.  I found myself missing the distinct tang of cream cheese; it felt like the double cream smoothed out the texture and the flavour.  More tang, please!  However, this didn’t stop me from hoovering it down with Dave.  Poor Lucas didn’t get a look in at all; probably a good thing, really.  He bounces off the walls enough already, thanks!!

I think a big thank-you is in order for Jenny, for making me be creative and have fun at the same time!

Don’t forget to check out the other amazing Daring Bakers creations via the blogroll.

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My love of lemon is no secret—so bright, cheerful and zingy—so it was probably no surprise to anyone in the family when I turned up to the Williams’ Mother’s Day gathering with a platter of lemon cupcakes.

Despite being very late to the cupcake party, I find myself completely captivated (or should that be infatuated?) with them at the moment.  You can do so much with them from the simplest swirl of vanilla buttercream to elaborate and whimsical gardens atop a cupcake.  There are some absolutely amazing cupcakes out there and it doesn’t surprise me that some bakers are now being described as cupcake artists.

These cupcakes are double-lemon, that is… a tender lemon sponge topped with a swirl of lemon buttercream.  I usually top cupcakes with a simple buttercream of butter and icing sugar, but this time I decided to go with the luscious and voluptuous Swiss meringue buttercream that the Daring Bakers Opera Cake challenge introduced me to.  I particularly like SMBB because it is just sweet enough (rather than being tooth-achingly sweet like the usual buttercream) but opinion was a bit divided on it.  I say that buttercream should be buttery, but I guess that if you were expecting regular (excessively sweet) buttercream it might be a bit of a surprise.  Hopefully a welcome one!

I had some left-over sugarpaste (fondant) so I had a go at making little rosebuds.  I think you can just about make out what they’re supposed to be!  I have invested in some cutters this week, so hopefully my next foray into sugarpaste flowers will be a little bit more successful!  I’m really enjoying playing around with sugarpaste; it’s just like Play-Do, with the bonus that you can eat it!  I also made some little hearts and finished off the whole thing with a little bit of glitz in the form of gold dragees (which I am still finding on the kitchen floor despite sweeping daily.  They get everywhere!)

As an extra-special treat for myself, and because I’ve had a bottle of rosewater sitting unloved in the larder for ages, I made a little rose buttercream which was gorgeous.  I really love the combination of lemon and rose; more people should use rosewater in cooking and baking!!

I am entering these cupcakes in Zorra’s Lemon Day event.  I wish I had her problem of a glut of lemons!!  I can’t think of anything better (except perhaps money growing on trees).  Lemon sorbet, lemon ice cream, lemon curd, lemon cheesecake, lemon jam, lemon tart, lemonade, lemon risotto, lemon & basil chicken, lemon drop cocktails, limoncello…

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Oh, lasagne… is there anything I won’t do for you?

For you, I would slave over the stove for hours to create the perfect ragu to lovingly spread between your silky layers.  I would whisk furiously to make a voluptuous bechamel to further your perfection.  I would squirrel away the best Parmigiano-Reggiano for you and you alone.  But, I have now come to a terrible realisation, dear lasagne.  All these years, all the stirring, the whisking, the grating, the love, and still I have wronged you.

Until yesterday, I have never made you your very own pasta.

I am so sorry.  You deserve better, lasagne *sniffle*

Fresh lasagna sheets from the supermarket simply won’t cut it any more, now that I’ve made my own and forget about dried, no need to cook lasagna!  My beautiful lasagne absolutely must have freshly rolled, home-made pasta.

Ahem.  I’m sure you didn’t come here to listen to some crazy lady talking to her lasagne, so without further ado… on to this month’s Daring Baker’s challenge!  The March 2009 challenge is hosted by Mary of Beans and Caviar, Melinda of Melbourne Larder and Enza of Io Da Grande. They have chosen Lasagne of Emilia-Romagna from The Splendid Table by Lynne Rossetto Kasper as the challenge.

This is the first time that I’ve made a lasagne completely from scratch.  (Well, to be fair. I didn’t mill the flour or make my own cheese, but you get what I mean, right?)  I’ll happily spend hours cossetting a ragu, throw together a great bechamel, but I’d never considered making my own lasagna sheets.  I have no idea why as I make my own ravioli quite a lot; making pasta isn’t difficult, just a little space-consuming in my little kitchen.  However, now that I’ve done it, and relatively successfully, I’ll certainly be making my own lasagna sheets.

I made the ragu and bechamel on Thursday; both straightforward once you get over the milk curdling scarily in the ragu.  Yes, this is normal. Yes, it’ll stop looking weird if you just let it do its thing on the stove.  And yes, you will find youself panicking even though you know it’s going to happen.

On Friday morning, while looking at the Daring Kitchen forums, I belatedly noticed that the posting date had been brought forward by two days.  I hate being late—you wouldn’t think so, considering how often I am late—so gone was my leisurely day of slowly and lovingly making pasta, then assembling the lasagne.  I was in a rush!

Making the pasta dough was fun, if a little messy.  I usually toss it all into the food processor until it reaches the bread-crumb stage, but being a good little Daring Baker, I proceeded to make a big mess on my worktop.  Like I said, fun   I had to add an extra egg and a few teaspoons of water squeezed from the spinach to get the dough to the right consistency, but I almost always have to add extra liquid when I make pasta.

Amazing what a difference kneading makes!

Lucas was fascinated by the creaking noise of the pasta machine and abandoned Peppa Pig for long enough to turn the handle and roll out two pieces of pasta.  I wish I’d been able to geta picture as it was really, really cute. Half-way through he turned round and said, “Mummy, I love making food!” He’s the sweetest little boy ever and was so proud to eat his pasta.

Following a tip on the private forums, I stacked all my sheets of pasta between layers of clingfilm which worked a treat and saved so much space.  I’ll definitely do that again.

I did take space-saving a little too far.  I decided that as my sheets of pasta were paper thin, I wouldn’t bother to blanch them in boiling water.  I just couldn’t picture getting my mountain of pasta drained properly on sheets of kitchen roll before assembling the lasagne.  And it was getting late, and someone else sait it worked out just fine for them… So, in they went, raw.

I think this would have been absolutely fine if I’d had a lot more bechamel.  I had to thin it a few times when reheating it as it just kept thickening even further, and I’m guessing that the lasagne soaked up plenty of the sauce when it was baking.  So, my lasagne didn’t have the gorgeously creamy white topping that it should have done, despite me holding back a really generous amount when I was building it.  It still tasted great, though.

I managed to use all the ragu, and all but three sheets of the spinach pasta, giving me eight layers. Wow!  It was really impressive to cut into it and see all the wonderful layers; the bechamel and ragu melted into the layers making everything was just so rich, voluptious and delicious.  How could it be otherwise?  It was lasagne.

I must thank our lovely hosta Mary, Melinda and Enza for a fantastic challenge.  We all loved the lasagne and I’ll definitely be making it, and variations, in the future.  How awesome would this be with roasted butternut squash?  I have to… after all, I have years of shocking neglect to make up to my lasagne…

Check out the Daring Blogroll to see all the other incredible lasagnes!

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This month’s Daring Bakers challenge, a Chocolate Valentino, was terribly apropos for February, the most romantic month in the calendar.

The Chocolate Valentino is a deceptively simple flourless chocolate cake that only has three ingredients: chocolate, butter and eggs.  The idea is that you use your favourite chocolate and are gifted in return with a cake that tastes exactly like the chocolate.

I must confess that I didn’t particularly like this cake.  Perhaps I did something wrong as it didn’t taste anywhere near as sweet as the chocolate I used and rather than having fudgy texture in the centre, it felt wet.  (There was some fudginess going on, but the unpleasant wet texture wiped it away.  I don’t think it was under-baked, though.)  Still, Lucas was a big fan, so I had at least one happy camper!  I wonder if I’m going off chocolate?  I seem to be leaning more towards nutty or fruity desserts these days…

I did however adore the ice cream.  As our hosts gave us a free rein on that subject, I took the opportunity to try a recipe I’ve had my eye on for a while: Toasted Almond Gelato from Gina DePalma’s Dolce Italiano, one of my favourite baking books.  The scent of toasted almonds lingered intoxicatingly around the house for several days, making me smile every time I came home.  It was just wonderful, and slightly less calorific than many other ice creams I’ve made in the past.  I couldn’t bear to throw away all of the almonds used to infuse the cream, so I added a few (finely chopped) spoonfuls into the gelato mixture before freezing which gave great texture to the gelato.

Almond and chocolate are a match made in heaven, so it was no surprise to me that the gelato managed to elevate the chocolate cake into something much more pleasant.  I can’t help wondering what I did wrong, and what it should have tasted like.  Divine, I should imagine…

The February 2009 challenge is hosted by Wendy of WMPE’s blog and Dharm of Dad ~ Baker & Chef.
We have chosen a Chocolate Valentino cake by Chef Wan; a Vanilla Ice Cream recipe from Dharm and a Vanilla Ice Cream recipe from Wendy as the challenge.

Don’t forget to check out the Daring Bakers Blogroll for other fabulous creations!

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I hardly ever eat fast food these days, but a few weeks into a diet and what do I start craving? Burgers and chips. *sigh*  My brain is a funny place at times.  So when I spotted a recipe for burger and chips in Irresistible, the new quarterly food magazine from Weight Watchers UK, I was very keen to try it out and hopefully avoid any insane late-night to Burger King.

I’ve got to say, there’s nothing new in this recipe—it’s all in the portion sizes, you know—but it makes a splendid (and delicious) base recipe for whatever variations your own imagination can come up with.  I laced last night’s burger with plenty of garlic, oregano, parsley and a pinch of chilli flakes for an Italian feel, further cemented by serving it with a balsamic tomato salad.  Next time I’m thinking of Mexican-style burger with cumin, jalapeños and fresh coriander, topped off with some searingly hot tomato salsa.  Yum.

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