Daring Cooks August Challange: Appam and Eggplant Curry

Mary, who writes the delicious blog, Mary Mary Culinary was our August Daring Cooks’ host. Mary chose to show us how delicious South Indian cuisine is! She challenged us to make Appam and another South Indian/Sri Lankan dish to go with the warm flat bread.

Next day, next post ... Really sad that I couldn't post this one in time. I love Indian food - and I loved the result from this challenge. It took me lots of time and sweat, because last weekend we had about 28°C in the kitchen - and I went into it and started frying eggplants ... (something I would normally never do - I hate frying, as I mentioned a dozen times before) I enjoyed the curry sauce - the combination of flavours was delicious, would be perfect with meat, fish or other vegetables too. I used the Appams as a wrap, and the rest of the curry ended up into Naan breads. Yummy!

Daring Bakers August Challenge: Candylicious - Milk Chocolate & Hazelnut Pralines and self-made Fudge

The August 2011 Daring Bakers’ Challenge was hosted by Lisa of Parsley, Sage, Desserts and Line Drive and Mandy of What the Fruitcake?!. These two sugar mavens challenged us to make sinfully delicious candies! This was a special challenge for the Daring Bakers because the good folks at http://www.chocoley.com offered an amazing prize for the winner of the most creative and delicious candy!

After (nearly) two weeks with dehydrated food in the Norwegian mountains I'm back home, enjoying fresh ingredients and all the things harvested from my brothers garden. We have lots of cucumber, zucchini and tomatoes.On our way home we were at my parent's annual plum-dumpling dinner and I got some of the remaining fruits. So we had plum cake (recipe from Dorie). Then we got pears from the father of my sister-in-law. So I made pear butter. Then there was the Daring Cooks Challenge for this mounth which I missed. So we had eggplant curry and appams (post will follow). After that it was time for this challenge. Really, my kitchen looked like a mess. Now I am exhausted writing this post, lucky I could assuage my sweet tooth. I decided to make the milk chocolate & hazelnut truffles which looked very appealing and reminded my of Ferrero Rocher which I like. I added some pepper to the truffle mixture - a spicy idea I borrowed from an ice cream recipe of David Lebovitz. As second I chose fudge although it's something I would call my nightmare. I tried svseral times to make a fudge recipe from Trish Deseine's Caramel-book. It never worked out. This time too I had to make another recipe for fudge twice before it worked.