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.

 

Daring Bakers July Challenge: Matcha and Cherry Frasier (Anne's birthday cake)

Jana of Cherry Tea Cakes was our July Daring Bakers’ host and she challenges us to make Fresh Frasiers inspired by recipes written by Elisabeth M. Prueitt and Chad Robertson in the beautiful cookbook Tartine.

As many times before, I used the challenge to create something for a special occassion. This time, it's a friends birthday I made the fraisier for. And as the cake is supposed to be a suprise, I'm not telling anything until it will have been served on saturday because this particulary friend is reading my blog. I'll give you just a small hint: The flavours are coming from far east, from the country of the cherry blossoms and tea ceremonies.

Right - this was supposed a Japanese Frasier flavoured with matcha and cherries, especially made for my friend Anne's birthday.  For the filling I wanted a subtle and sweet taste, so choose some jasmine tea instaed of the vanilla for the creme anglaise. The ready cake didn't look very pretty  - I omitted the almond paste topping because I thougt it would be to sweet for the matcha, and the fillings did look unpleasantly greyish brown (because of the jasmine tea) but must have tasted really good.
Why do I write 'must have'? Because I didn't get a single crumb of it - the birthday guests were eating faster than I could cut the pieces and some guests even ate more than one ... I am glad it turned out so well - I was a little bit unsure if the combination would work out but it obviouly did. It even tasted better than a second cake I made (which was a delicious red velvet cake with straw- and blueberries and a mascarpone and cream cheese frosting). I guess I have to add frasiers to my birthday cake repertoire - next time maybe a lemon-blueberry one? The pictures I took were mostly made at the party, so the quality isn't that brilliant but they are quite nice shots.