Daring Bakers Challenge: March 2010

The 2010 March Daring Baker’s challenge was hosted by Jennifer of Chocolate Shavings. She chose Orange Tian as the challenge for this month, a dessert based on a recipe from Alain Ducasse’s Cooking School in Paris.

For recipe, head on over to the The Daring Kitchen... Or just click
[ HERE ] if you're lazy.


Italian strawberries and ripe, juicy oranges? Yes, please!
To be honest, I'm not much of an orange person. It's not that I don't like them - I do - but for some inexplicable reason I'm ridiculously picky when it comes to oranges. In order for me actually eat one, it has have to have the exact right texture, scent, colour and, obviously, flavour. I don't know how many oranges I've peeled just to end up throwing away throughout my 20 (21 in a week! *hint hint*) years on this planet... All I know is that it's far too many.


No. I didn't blanch the oranges. And yes. that was a poor choice. I'm not the brightest crayon in the box. ;)

For some reason though, despite the challenge being an orangeydessertish one (and a tian at that, I'd never even heard of a tian before this challenge, and when I did my research all that popped up on google were vegetable and seafood creations. My inital reaction was "Vad i helvete?!" <- don't google that. It'll ruin my image.) this challenge made me feel more excited than I have in a long time. I have no idea why, but I'm thankful it did. The end result was not only goregeous, but utterly and completly delicious. I'll definitely be making this dessert again!
Segmenting oranges gets messy. See: LINK

Next time I make it though, I will NOT be making everything but the Patee Sable in in the middle of the night. Granted, the finished dessert did make a lovely midnight snack, but that was not my intention. Daylight pictures > Nighttime pictures. End of story. I also won't be making it in a foil-piepan. Unless I haven't bough proper cookie cutters until then, in which case I will. xD


If that's not sex in a food processor, I don't know what to believe in anymore.

That, my dears, would be Pate Sablee in the making. It's delicious. I made mine using salted butter (blasphemy?), vanilla sugar (let's just say that vanilla extract and I are no longer dating) and an eff-woo attitude towards my measuring tools.


Yum. Yum. YUM. That pretty much sums up my feelings about the PS.
Oh and just for the record - if you click the pics you'll see larger sizes of the same images. Just a little fyi. :) Except for the image above unfortunately.. all my pictures of the finished patee sable were as blurry as a picture of the Loch Ness monster. But enough about that, let's talk about all the lovely things I learned when making this dessert... All but one are represented in the image below.

1.2.3 Not only you and me, got one eighty degrees and I'm caught in between countin' 1,2,3.

1. Segmenting small oranges takes forever. Especially when using an oversized, blunt knife.

2. Talking to your sister while whipping cream is a horrible idea that will lead to a bad case of overwhipping. And you know what? There is nothing sexy whatsoever about overwhipped whipped cream. Except maybe the flavour.

3. When the recipe for the marmalade says "Blanch the orange slices 3 times" & "finely mince them" ...don't be creative (a.k.a lazy). Really, don't. I ended up wasting pretty much all of my marmalade when separating the orange slices from the finished product and it took forever. The marmalade did end up superyummy though. :) (once the bitter orangeslices were removed that is)

4. Caramel+Malin don't go together well. At all. I ended up making a gigantic mess on the stove, burn myself, waste a lot of juice (and sugar). It was a disaster and I failed miserbly, but that's okay, it still tasted great.

Looks can be deceiving.

I talk too much. SO. Over to more intresting things: THE FINISHED PRODUCT. (what, no standing ovation? Pfft.) Which was delicious. I pretty much ate the entire thing all by myself. In less than 24 hours. It was so good, I didn't worry about the calories at all. Not even once.

Is it too obvious that the strawberry is a desperate attempt to try and look artsy? xD

Sooo delish! I'll definitely be making this again :)

Yummyness on a plate, with and without saucy deliciousness.

I like to think of it as my own (now deceased) personal little edible [Glow in the Dark] version of [ Pac Man ]. In other words - complete and utter awesomeness.

I mean honestly. Could ANYONE say no to that?


I sure as hell couldn't. :)

EDIT: ...Damnit. I forgot about my background not being white. Isch. Not okay. Blergh. I'll fix it. When I get the time. So probably never. >_>

Lovely, Just lovely.

I love tiramisu. I really do. In fact, love doesn't even begin to cover my feelings for tiramisu. If I were to be executed (which, seeing as we don't practice the death penalty in Sweden, I probably won't) my last meal would have tiramisu in it. And probably a million other things as well seeing as I am a pig... but that's not the point.

I was delighted when I found out that the February Daring Bakers challenge was just that - tiramisu. The first thing I did was to run out and buy myself a bottle of Vecchioflorio, the only marsala wine I could find (Systembolaget fail? Maybe. I wouldn't know). Unfortunately, that's as far as I got. Real life caught up with me in every single way possible, and I neither had the time nor the energy to deal with the challenge. I will though. Just not now. For now, I'll just torture myself by admiring, and drooling over, others' creations.

ANYWAYS. Point is: If you haven't, head on over to The Daring Kitchen for a visual tiramisugasm of major proportions (and the recipe of course!).

Where the eagles cry.

I uploaded a new image to my [ devart ]
It made me smile that 4s after I'd posted it, someone added it to one of their collections. Not that many people find my photos. Not that many people care. Not that many people like them. And that's okay. But everytime someone likes what I've uploaded, it makes my heart smile. :)

78 things.

I just got back from bowling with a couple of my classmates. I'm terrible at bowling, but I had a lot of fun regardless...and now I'm completly, and utterly exhausted. So, instead of playing with the new generation of behavioral scientists at my university or facing my demons and finally bake a lovely, flour-less chocolate cake, I'll just post this instead.

78 things that make me happy.


Click image for full-size view.

Some of them are obvious, some are not.
Some are more important than others, and some got lost on the way.
But then again, that's life.

Image credit to Youniverse.com
You should check out their visual dna personality tests... they're fun to take, pretty to look at and spot on. At least they were for me. Though, I'm not sure that's a good thing.

xoxo

Daring Bakers Challenge: Januari 2010

The January 2010 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Lauren of Celiac Teen. Lauren chose Gluten-Free Graham Wafers and Nanaimo Bars as the challenge for the month. The sources she based her recipe on are 101 Cookbooks and www.nanaimo.ca.

To open recipe and instructions in Microsoft Word, click [ HERE ]
Oh. and btw, it doesn't take two whole days. It takes like 45 min +2 1/2 hours. Don't let my slowness scare you away.

Whereas I didn't make my nanaimo bars gluten-free (it would've been far too expensive if I had seeing as 1) it had just been christmas and 2) I hadn't gotten my study grant yet. I still havent. And I have bills to pay, hello panic attack?) I did, however, read up a bit on Celiac Disease as a way of making up for my stinginess. If you're intrested in doing so, I suggest clicking one of the two links below (the second one is in swedish).

[ Celiac Disease ]
[ Glutenintolerans ]

---- Day 1 ----

Note to self:
Don't you EVER make graham crackers again. Do you hear me? They are evil. EVIL. Oh, you don't remember why? No? Let me enlighten you, dear - Graham Crackers BROKE your mother's oven. Yeah. That's right. Broke. The things on the inside of the oven fell apart. You know, where you hang the "baking-plates"?

Okay. Maybe, just maybe, it was my fault. But I don't know what I did. Actually I do. - I didn't do a thing. Ahem. I was just sitting in the other room, chatting with one of my friends on msn (I love her to death... and not only because her life is like something out of days of our lives.. it's very amusing, I tell ya. She even has a Stefano, I kid you not. The only thing missing is an evil twin) when I heard a loud noise coming from the kitchen. Fortunately, I managed to fix it without waking up my mother... that would've been bad. o.O;

... The image is supposed to be centered, but apparently, blogger hates me too. xD
You'll have to use your imagination. Do it. Come on. Think like the picture. BE THE PICTURE. Okay. I can't blame you if you don't - I wouldn't want to be that picture either :P

Yes. I did forget them in the oven. That's why they look so bad (see those disgusting fat stains? That used to be covered in burnt graham crackerishness. Yum) Well. That and the fact that the image quality is crap. Photobucket, much like those graham crackers once were, is hating on me. Very much so. The crackers tasted alright though, not that I had much to compare them with - I'd never eaten graham crackers before so I didn't quite know what to expect. If I ever make them again, I'll probably use another kind of honey, the kind I used wasn't as mild as I'd expected, and I'll probably reduce the amount of baking soda :P Don't tell anyone, but I accidentally added too much baking soda (I forgot that I'd halfed the recipe), so they were a bit too thick for my liking - in other words: good thing the recipe called for graham cracker crumbs. And good thing I used a not-mild enough honey - it hid the baking soda flavour nicely. Oh, and good thing I'd never made graham crackers prior to the DB challenge... you know what that means, don't you? I get to say that I've never eaten such delicious AND pretty graham crackers before. Ever. And. It's not a lie. :)

---- Day 2 ----

Unlike the previous day, day 2 did not bring any unpleasant surprises. My only surprise was that I didn't hate the Nanaimo Bars. To be honest, I'm a bit of a food snob sometimes. Especially when it comes to baking. Swedish pastries/cakes/muffins/other baked stuff are just "SO" much better (even if they're not) than for example American, or, as in this case - Canadian (... I'm very good at being obnoxious in case you hadn't noticed, very easy to dislike) I know it's all in my head, and that other countries have awesome recipes too, but I tend to shoot recipes down before giving them a try. Especially when I get insecure in my own ability. I guess it all boils down to the fact that a) I overanalyze recipes, making them seem odder than they really are b) I grew up here, eating a certain type of pastries etc. It's what I'm used to. (In all fairness though, I've had my fair share of odd foreign recipes) And I'm sorry. But vanilla extract will never float my boat. Not even the pure vanilla extract. There. I said it. I'm breaking up with vanilla extract.

That being said: Back to the bars - I absolutely loved the bottom layer. I only wish I'd added a couple of teaspoons of coffee to it as I had intended to in the first place. Maybe a bit of oatmeals as well. The middle layer - not so much. At least not in it itself. The top layer was a dream (despite me not waiting for the chocolate too cool enough.. Bad choice.), but then again, how could it not be? It's chocolate. And together - much, much better than I had expected. A bit sweet, but I liked them anyways. My mother loved them. My sisters seemed to love them as well. :)

I can't wait to see what next months recipe will be. Or to what corner of the world it will take me (and yes, I do realize I could just take a look in the hosting schedule thread, but I don't want to - that would ruin the surprise) - Oklahoma? Brazil? India? Australia? Or perhaps France? (Ok. It's probably an american who will host, but I won't let that burst my bubble. I refuse to let it burst my bubble. My bubble is solid). My point is - I don't think I'll ever cease to be amazed by how small the world have gotten. It's amazing. In fact, I think I might dive into google and see where to travel next. I'm thinking either the moon, South Africa or Hollywood. Something intresting might have happened in Perez-land. Maybe Brangelina adopted another kid.

xoxo

Ps. Scratch the where-do-I-travel-next-part. I'm going to Quantico, baby. Spencer Reid awaits.

A cup of coffee in the morning.

Lately, I've been having trouble gathering my thoughts - I know exactly what I want to write, but I just can't seem to find the words. They're in there somewhere, I know it... I just don't know where and it's extremely frustrating. So. Instead of wasting more time staring at the screen, I'll just post a picture from last summer instead:


Click image for original size (and my devart).

I miss...