December Daring Bakers' Part Two!

December Daring Bakers' post two! I took the opportunity to make Y's recipe for Scandinavian Gingerbread into ten miniature houses for a group of friends to decorate at our Christmas party. It proved one thing: put a pile of twenty-somethings in a kitchen with royal icing and candies, and all hell breaks loose!

The December 2009 Daring Bakers’ challenge was brought to you by Anna of Very Small Anna and Y of Lemonpi. They chose to challenge Daring Bakers’ everywhere to bake and assemble a gingerbread house from scratch. They chose recipes from Good Housekeeping and from The Great Scandinavian Baking Book as the challenge recipes.

The recipe made for a very dry dough, and even after sitting in the fridge as directed, it crumbled into a zillion pieces. I ended up having to add some water and a bit more butter to the dough to make it hold together for rolling. In the end, it made the dough easier to work with, and didn't make it any less flavourful.

Putting the houses together took no time, and I think it was very much due to having the royal icing at the perfect consistency. Too runny and the "glue" didn't dry quick enough to keep the house standing; too thick and it didn't actually stick to the gingerbread!

The decorating, though, was by far the best part! We acted like three year olds and generally got icing and candy everywhere! Below are the variety of houses we produced. Overall, fun was had by all of us!

Daring Bakers - December 2009 - Gingerbread Houses

Hello!

Well, this is my first Daring Bakers post as I sadly missed last month. While going to the Grey Cup was quite the experience, it bumped my plans to bake cannoli! Oh well. I guess I'll just have to redeem myself with a gingerbread house this month.

The December 2009 Daring Bakers’ challenge was brought to you by Anna of Very Small Anna and Y of Lemonpi. They chose to challenge Daring Bakers’ everywhere to bake and assemble a gingerbread house from scratch. They chose recipes from Good Housekeeping and from The Great Scandinavian Baking Book as the challenge recipes.

I ended up making my gingerbread house with a friend from work and her kids. Because I was making it with her, she had already done the gingerbread up ahead of time, so I didn't have a chance to use one of the recipes provided. However, I used it for something else, which I'll explain later. As for my house, I went over to her place and we spent 3 hours rolling and baking gingerbread to make 4 houses. I started off with quite a monstrosity:



However, after a tragic accident while we were trying to secure her house, the front fell off of mine! Oh no! Well, as any cook or baker knows, you have to be able to improvise. So, I took the pieces I had and created a new gingerbread house in a different shape (mine is on the left):


By this point we were exhausted. So exhausted that I forgot I had some peanut butter and a glass in my house to help hold up the walls, but I put the roof on anyway. We solved that by waiting until it dried and then lifting the house off the base to rescue the items!

At this point we left the houses to dry for a few days until we had a chance to get together again for decoration. We ran to the Bulk Barn to get candy for decoration and found ourselves well supplied. After a few more hours of decorating, this is what I ended up with:


Details: Shreddies Shingles, Chocolate Covered Sunflower Seed Christmas Lights, Pretzel Fence, Pretzel Flower Holder, Flowers made of Chocolate Covered Sunflower Seeds, Chocolate Rock walkway/driveway, Nibs Mailbox, White Chocolate Pistole Light, Green-Dyed Coconut Lawn

And then my friend's daughter thought the back of my house was boring, so I added some light around the windows and wrote Merry Xmas out of string licorice.


And when all was said and done, we snuck our houses into the Retirement Home we work at to put on display as a gift from Santa.



As for the provided recipes - I did the first recipe provided from Good Housekeeping and found it to be incredibly dry and crumbly - and I hadn't even added all the flour required. However, after reading the notes from the posters, I took their advice and left it in the fridge overnight to let the moisture spread throughout the gingerbread. This really didn't help and the gingerbread remained crumbly and hard to use. As of right now I haven't had a chance to do anything with it, but once I do, I'll use my go-to solution for things like this - add syrup! A bit of corn syrup will bring it right together so I can roll and bake it.

The November Daring Bakers Challenge: Cannoli

I love the smell of a fresh blog. Shiny, new, and full of promise. For me, the whole intention of starting a food blog was so that I could partake in the Daring Bakers Challenges run out of the Daring Kitchen. So, here it is, November's challenge!

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.

It would figure that the first thing I'd have to tackle would be something deep-frying-related. Deep frying has never been a big part of my family's cooking habits - anything deep fried is bought from a restaurant or store. However, the point of the challenge was to get out of the comfort zone and do things that we never would otherwise try, so all par for the course, right?

The first challenge of the challenge was finding cannoli forms. I figured that since it was my first challenge and something I wasn't at all familiar with, I would suck it up and pay for cannoli forms that I purchaed. Well. Finding them turned out to be a problem. It wasn't until after I had given up that someone suggested that Michael's might have had them. Oh well, I was happy with what I ended up with. Seeing as dad has just about every kind of woodworking product and tool known to man, I was able to locate a one-inch dowel that we trimmed down to length and sanded carefully before oiling. I now have two authentic-looking forms, and they worked fabulously!


The dough was really stiff, and I have to admit that I doubted it the entire way through. I managed to roll it out eventually (with some help from my strong and manly brother), and it looked passable. Frying was not so scary, and in the end, I turned out some very good looking cannoli shells, if I do say so myself. I have learned one of the most important parts of this challenge: do not doubt the recipe until you know for certain you have failed miserably and need to start again.


Overall it turned out well. We dipped the ends of some of them in chocolate and crushed candy canes, since I had stopped into the grocery store and bought the candy canes on a whim. They were delicious with a nice glass of milk!