A FRIDGE FULL OF FOOD...

Daring Bakers: Milk Chocolate & Caramel Tart

I found this challenge to be just that: challenging.  While I have an extensive background in baking cakes, tarts I'm not as familiar with so this was fun in a slightly stressful way, let me put it that way. I've never before made my own mousse or caramel. I've always wanted to do both but yesterday was a first for both. I learned a lot, mostly from my mistakes. But that's the whole point of being in the Daring Bakers group. I wanted the challenge of exploring new baking territory.

For a list of all the challengers, click on Daring Bakers for links.

Not to continue complaining about my knees but I'm going to anyway. Still having problems with them. Still miserable at work (from my knees only) and had a doc appt yesterday about them.  We're going to try a new painkiller that's non-narcotic, thank God, and maybe some joint fluid therapy.

In the meantime, I admit, even though cooking is still relaxing for me, I have to be careful on my days off not to spend too much time standing or it makes it worse for work.  This little project was four hours in the kitchen!  I'd put off making the tart until right at deadline time so there was no doing one little thing a day crap. It was a straight on onslaught with putting things that needed cooling into the freezer and cutting out all the middle man of time I could.

Let me walk you through my experience with this little recipe.  For one, the first thing it says is that the shortbread pastry will make three tarts. Well, I didn't need bulk, I needed ONE.  But instead of dividing everything by three, since dividing two eggs into three parts, gets dicey, I divided everything in half and went from there. I think I ended up with a little too thick of shortbread crust but it's good and we'll survive the trauma of having a thicker crust, you know?

I did make two alterations to the recipe. We're supposed to run the recipe as is but I had a couple of problems. For one, this really was a hit and run this time so it was one trip to one grocery store and one afternoon. So when I couldn't fine the hazelnuts on my pass through the grocery store, I chose to read "hazelnuts" as "almonds".  And I left the cinnamon out of the crust completely.  My husband, Gene, hates cinnamon and since I'm counting on him to eat a goodly portion of this thing, it made no sense to alienate my audience from the beginning.

Daring Bakers Newbie--My First Bagels Ever!

One little thing to talk about before I start the bagel post--for those of you who missed the ending about the cake I mailed to Sher of What Did You Eat, the cake did arrive by 10am the next morning and it traveled really well, better than I thought it would. The only visible sign of having been shipped is that the plastic wrap left a faint pattern in the top of the fondant. That's it.  Sher said she and Bob really enjoyed it and so did her friend Nancy, who dropped by after work.

To see the cake, how it arrived, and what it looked like cut into, click HERE to go to Sher's weblog.

What a great experiment! I was really pleased with the results. So now we know: you really can mail cake and get it there in one piece (bad pun) and edible.

To the Daring Bakers founders, Ivonne of Creampuffs in Venice and Lisa of La Mia Cucina, thank you for including me into the group.  I love the whole concept of challenging ourselves to new baking heights, especially the whole idea of mixing it up between sweet and savory, cakes to pies to breads to whomever's-turn-it-is-to-name-it.  Because my--cough cough--expertise--cough cough is in cakes and decorating cakes, I was thrilled to try my hand at bagels, something completely different from my norm. 

I do make loaves of bread and dinner rolls all the time for our meals, by hand at times and by having burned through three (yes, THREE) bread machines over the last 15 years of my marriage (the first was a wedding gift), but I've never tired bagels or pretzels. I've thought about it but the DB group and this challenge gave me the proper motivation I needed to take the plunge, pun intended.  For those of you who don't get the joke in "take the plunge" you will as soon as you read the recipe and see the pics.

This month's challenge was created by Jenny of All Things Edible and Freya of Writing at the Kitchen Table and the recipe's title is:  Real Honest Jewish Purist's Bagels.

I'll tell you what my very first thought was when I printed off the recipe and it printed off to 3 1/2 page--"(Screw) me! I wanted to be in this group why?!"  I then mentally added and "Oy!" just to stay in theme. 

Well, you know what? A couple of the techniques were different from anything else I'd done before but it wasn't really "hard".  Putting them together, following the recipe, and coming out with a usable product at the other end was not difficult, BUT, what was really difficult was getting them any resemblance this side of heaven to each other.  I know, and the recipe reaffirmed, that a real bagel is formed by hand and that they're not completely uniform, but let me show you something that explains my personality and why that lack of uniformity bugged me--

This was my hors d'oeuvres table from the Pampered Chef party I hosted the other night. See my cheese tray in the front?  Let me make it a little easier for you--

There are three layers of cheese slices in each row, lined up to perfectly fill edge to edge.  My husband walked up behind me while I was carefully slicing each piece as evenly as possible and using a ruler I keep in the kitchen to line up the front edge exactly.  He stood there for a while. Of course he was admiring my precision, I thought.  Nah.  He looked at me with the same look of disgust he'd have if he found a booger in his coffee and said "You are the biggest control freak I know and THAT'S the proof, right there."  And then he walked away LAUGHING at me. Not WITH me. AT me.

I was a little put out by that comment, especially since he disrupted my concentration on making my cheese exactly even on every side.  How could he say such a thing just because I like inanimate objects to do what I want them to and to do it in as uniform a manner as possible?  Is that so much to ask from a world that revolves supposedly on the chaos theory? 

I didn't think so either.

So my point of that story is if you are like me and you're a big control freak one of those people who likes everything to be prettily perfect in every way... this recipe is even more of a challenge than Jenny and Freya had any idea it would be because those little buggers do not like to be the same size, shape, consistency to each other no matter how much you poke, roll, shape, slap, dunk, or swear at them.  And believe me, I tried all of those things, especially the swearing, and they still came out an attractive bunch of bagels on the whole but not even close to consistent and perfect. Sigh. So look at the recipe as an exercise in humility and plow through anyway because the end result will forever ruin you for a grocery store-bought bagel.  I think Gene and I each ate four a piece the first day.  Hmmmm...maybe making them often isn't such a good idea.

To see how the other members of the group fared, click on any of the blog names in the list on the left, titled "Daring Bakers".