Daring Bakers

Hello Daring Bakers!

Our July 2012 Daring Bakers’ Host was Dana McFarland and she challenged us to make homemade crackers! Dana showed us some techniques for making crackers and encouraged to use our creativity to make each cracker our own by using ingredients we love.

Oh my crackers are a deceptively simple thing!  Very quick to make and easy to put together with ingredients you almost surely have on hand in the kitchen, crackers are something that can be thrown together on almost a moment’s notice.

Oh my oh my!

Audax Artifex was our January 2012 Daring Bakers’ host. Aud worked tirelessly to master light and fluffy scones (a/k/a biscuits) to help us create delicious and perfect batches in our own kitchens!

And Aud did inspire us!  Just check out his scones!!

The February 2011 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Mallory from A Sofa in the Kitchen. She chose to challenge everyone to make Panna Cotta from a Giada De Laurentiis recipe and Nestle Florentine Cookies.

This was a great challenge.  Not because we loved the results (although they were quite good), but because the recipe is so easy and so flexible that it allows tremendous room for creativity and improvisation.

Otherwise known as fruitcake!

First, the words…

The 2010 December Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Penny of Sweet Sadie’s Baking. She chose to challenge Daring Bakers’ to make Stollen. She adapted a friend’s family recipe and combined it with information from friends, techniques from Peter Reinhart’s book………and Martha Stewart’s demonstration.

I am so sorry to have missed out on October’s DB challenge.  Although I am happily relaxing right now at the end of our Career Week at Thunderbird, part of me (mostly the hungry tummy part) really wishes I had somehow scraped together the energy to make this challenge happen.  Someday, when the MBA is a long-finished achievement and the husband and I are settled into our new place that has enough space to have a proper deep fryer located someplace outside the house, we will make donuts all the time (note to potential employers – I love to bring in homemade treats to work).

Dare it up.

The November 2009 Daring Bakers Challenge was chosen and hosted by Lisa Michele of Parsley, Sage, Desserts and Line Drives. She chose the Italian Pastry, Cannolo (Cannoli is plural), using the cookbooks Lidia’s Italian-American Kitchen by Lidia Matticchio Bastianich and The Sopranos Family Cookbook by Allen Rucker; recipes by Michelle Scicolone, as ingredient/direction guides. She added her own modifications/changes, so the recipe is not 100% verbatim from either book.

Ah, the deep fry. Producing deliciously tasty treats and requiring all the oil in your house, all the patience you can muster, all the 409 under the sink (for clean up) and all the calories left in your day (for eating)…