December Cooking Challenge : Char Sui

Our Daring Cooks’ December 2011 hostess is Sara from Belly Rumbles! Sara chose awesome Char Sui Bao as our challenge, where we made the buns, Char Sui, and filling from scratch – delicious!

I was super excited about this challenge, I love Dim Sum. These were absolutely delicous and actually relatively easy to make. I made the Cha Sui with the red food coloring. I try and limit our food coloring around here and I was so glad that Sara gave us that option. I did the method of searing the meat first on the stovetop to brown it then finish it in the oven. When making the Cha Sui Bao I did the oven method since I currently don't own a steamer, but I think I may have to put one on my Christmas list. The only thing I would change for next time would be to add more filling. I didn't put enough in mine so each one was a lot of bread with just a little bit of meat. Other than that, delicious!

November Baking Challenge

Catherine of Munchie Musings was our November Daring Bakers’ host and she challenged us to make a traditional Filipino dessert – the delicious Sans Rival cake! And for those of us who wanted to try an additional Filipino dessert, Catherine also gave us a bonus recipe for Bibingka which comes from her friend Jun of Jun-blog.

I know, I'm running a little behind. Now I actually did attempt to make this challenge, but I had a little problem with my meringues for my San Rival cake. I don't think I cooked them long enough so they never got firm they stayed kind of gooey. I could see that this would have been a delicious dessert though.

I did make the Bibingka and it turned out really good, much better than I would have expected after just reading the ingredients. I even took a picture as you can see above :) The only thing was they tasted warm out of the oven but after spending a day in the fridge, the texture became must heavier and not as appealing. I guess it's a good thing I ate two right away! :)

November Cooking Challenge

Sarah from Simply Cooked was our November Daring Cooks’ hostess and she challenged us to create something truly unique in both taste and technique! We learned how to cook using tea with recipes from Tea Cookbook by Tonia George and The New Tea Book by Sara Perry.

I tried two recipes this month, Tea Eggs and a Beef Braised in Rooibos Tea with Sweet Potatoes. The first I tried was the Tea Eggs. I think keeping the eggs sitting in the boiling water made them a bit overcooked to eat but they did look very cool. Of course, now my son is not happy with boring old boiled eggs, he keeps telling me he wants the fancy eggs. Then a few days later I made the Braised Beef. Wow! It was wonderful. I used Cinnamon Roiboos Tea from Teavana. It was amazing, what good flavors. My husband described it as Autumn in a bowl and I have to agree. The only thing I would do differently would be to chop the sweet potatoes into small chunks instead of slices. I think it would have looked nicer.

I did take pictures of the eggs, but not the Beef. I will be making it again very soon though since we enjoyed it so much. Hopefully one of these weeks I can get organized enough to actually get my pictures on the computer!

October Baking Challenge - Challenge #1

My very first baking challenge was quite a doozy. I had such little confidence that it would turn out the first time around, that I didn't even take any pictures of the process. It was Povitica, a sweet yeast bread that I had never experience or even heard of. I had originally planned to set aside a whole afternoon where I could focus on preparing this bread. Well, life happens, and instead I ended up preparing it on a cold rainy day where the family was stuck inside suffering from head colds. I managed to prepare it in between various children's needs including a baby that needs constant feedings.

My first challenge was to change the filling. Due to peanut allergies by my oldest darling daughter, I changed the filling from a walnut filling to a sweetened cream cheese filling. Then my son wanted to help me with the process. Now, I love baking with him, but this was something that needed to be done according to directions and at a certain pace and he doesn't really work that way. Thankfully, I made enough for two sets of dough, so somehow I talked him into letting me prepare the first one how I wanted and then let him play with the second dough.

After all the additional challenges and my lack of confidence from the beginning, the bread turned out great. In fact, my children declared it their most favorite bread ever! :-)

let the baking begin

I am so excited to having joined the Daring Bakers. I am so excited for this month's challenge. Look for the big reveal on the 27th! : )