Well, it’s time for another Daring Bakers adventure, and what fun this one was! This month’s challenge was hosted by Daring Baker co-founders Ivonne of Cream Puffs In Venice and Lis of La Mia Cucina, with help from Fran of Apples Peaches Pumpkin Pie and Shea of Whiskful. The challenge is dedicated to Barbara of winosandfoodies.com and the Taste of Yellow LiveSTRONG event. In addition to this challenge, this month was also exciting because it brought a new Daring Bakers’ website, including public baking forums which you, dear reader, should go check out.

But enough with the business. You want to hear about cake! This month’s challenge was an Opera Cake. Though Opera cakes are usually flavored with dark ingredients like coffee or chocolate, these Opera Cakes were to choose light spring colors and flavorings. I’d recently been remembering a delicious white chocolate, honey, and lavender terrine I had when Mom and I visited Provence, so I immediately decided those would be the flavors I would pick.

Since Matt was out of town on baking day, Mom came over to our apartment and made the cake with me. I was sure glad — we had a lot of fun, and nothing was that hard, but there were times it was busy and it was good to have two sets of hands. I have to say, I’m pretty proud of how this came out. Aside from not letting the ganache firm up enough so that the glaze melted it a little, the cake looks beautiful, and it tasted delicious as well. Maybe a tad on the sweet side, but what kind of a complaint is that?! I was particularly glad of how much the lavender flavor came out. I thought it might be too subtle, but instead it asserted its presence just enough. Thanks Ivonne, Lis, Fran, and Shea, for a fun and whimsical challenge! Be sure to check out all the other Opera Cakes with the DB blogroll!

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And the finish line…wait where did the crowd go…oh I am a bit late.  First, Second, and Last Place have all finished, cleaned, and gone home for a long winter’s nap, but here we are at last.

The Daring Bakers challenge for April, hosted by Elle from Feeding My Enthusiasms (who recently brought us Chocolate Bakewell Tarts) and Deborah from Taste and Tell, was right up my alley, if I were at the receiving end.  It was Chocolate Covered Cheesecake pops.   I love cheesecake, typically I like it with some sort of fruit inside or a nice fruit topping.  I have to admit I never made a cheesecake, so when I had only two hours before church I decided I would take it slow.  I enjoyed a nice cup of coffee and a muffin while strolling the isles of the grocery store finding the ingredients for my grandmother’s spaghetti sauce, which I will share later, and this great challenge.

Once home from church about 2:30 I quickly started adding the time and knew it was going to be tight, but now real ways to rush it.  The ingredients gathered above I thought made a great picture and a great start for the baking.  I only wish it wasn’t the best part, well at least one of the highlights.

The cheesecake itself went together fairly seamlessly.  Getting the cheese to soften up was the only tricky part, as I ignored the part about having it a room temperature.  After baking almost twice as long as the recipe stated we were finally ready for the two stage cooling.  Once to get it to room temperature.  Secondly to get it nice and set for cutting.

I decided I didn’t want to make pops but rather used cookie cutters.  This was a fairly messy and frustrating choice at first but I quickly got the hang of it.  Soon I had about 4 large plates full of triangles, squares, balls, and one mini cheesecake sliced to perfection.

Off to the freezer, and I was off to bed…well I thought I was.  With some encouraging words from my loving wife I was back in the kitchen melting chocolates in the double boiler.  Out of the freezer and into chocolate easy enough.  Soon I realized  lots of chocolate was getting wasted and pooling at the bottom of each piece.  A call up to my wife who successfully had done this a few weeks earlier for a bit of support.  Together we played with the temperature and it all went downhill from there.   My wife reminded me that the many times she had done chocolate this never happened.  The second batch, milk chocolate this time, went even worse.  This went crystalline very quickly.  I wonder if this was the fact that I washed and not thoroughly dried the double boiler between rounds.  About the only successful in that batch was the mini slice that you can see below.

I did ultimately enjoy doing this recipe.  I also enforced for myself that I am not a great baker without the support of one of the strong women in my life either calling the shots or right there helping me along.  But if you find a good recipe or even just the need for anything to be simmered, sliced, chopped, grilled, flipped, or fried I am right there ready to charge ahead.

Oh yeah I almost forgot they do taste wonderfully.  My wife likes the smaller ones with more chocolate and I adore the larger ones with more cheesecake.  I do find that I eat around the outside and save that last glorious bite from the center for the very end.  Enjoy!  And while you’re at it, check out some of the other Daring Bakers’ lovely creations on the blogroll. If you want to try these yourself, you can find the recipe (which was adapted from Sticky, Chewy, Messy, Gooey) on Deborah’s post.

This month, I joined my first blogging event — The Daring Bakers. This is a group of (mostly) bloggers that all bake the same recipe once a month, and then all post on it the same day. One person sets this “challenge recipe” and everyone has to basically follow the recipe — few modifications are allowed. The idea is to bake outside our comfort zones a bit, but with a supportive group around to learn from and to compare our results. So this month I joined the Daring Bakers and our first recipe was Julia Child’s French Bread, hosted by Breadchick at The Sour Dough and Sara of I Like to Cook.

Talk about a challenge! I was excited when I found out this month’s challenge would be bread since I haven’t ever made anything but quick bread before and I’d been wanting to try it. But, it was also intimidating. This bread required three different rises, and the shaping was also fairly complicated. (You would think you just roll it into a log to make a baguette, but there’s actually a lot more to it in order to make the bread so that it’ll form a nice crust and gain enough volume and be able to support itself without baking in a pan. Or so I read.) Also, in order to make a simulated “baker’s oven”, I had to find a way to produce steam in the oven. So, all told, a good 6-8 hours to complete, but it was a lot of fun. I was pretty pleased with how the bread looked and tasted. So, if you are feeling ambitious, I recommend this bread, but I will admit I probably won’t make a habit of making this every weekend.

Thanks again to Sara and Breadchick for coming up with a great the challenge this month, and check out my fellow Daring Bakers’ posts from the Daring Bakers Blogroll.

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