Daring Baker Challenge- April

Cheesecake! Seriously, I know. Could this possibly be more up my alley??

The April 2009 challenge is hosted by Jenny from Jenny Bakes. She has chosen Abbey's Infamous Cheesecake as the challenge.

The plan was to take a basic cheesecake recipe that was given and turn it into a show stopper. My drug of choice for this particular challenge was inspired by my hubby... Oreos.
I'm not a huge Oreo person, and neither is Phil but he'll have it blended into ice cream and whatnot. Blended into cheesecake Oreos become soft and pretty easy to cut through.
I'm no stranger to baking cheesecake. I actually just made my favorite dark chocolate version for Easter. This one I had problems with, which is why I'm not attaching the recipe here. It was a much thinner batter then any other cheesecake I've made which didn't post any pan leaking problems because of the way I did my crust. However, when I took it out at what should have been the perfect temperature, it cracked like the Grand Canyon. Might have been the recipe, might have been the fact that I added heavy cookie chunks to the top, I'm not sure. Good news is that it still tasted absolutely delicious even though it's appearance was a bit lacking. We just finished off the last two leftover pieces last night and are so sad to see it all done. Hopefully the boys and I can go pick some strawberries soon and make some pie or cobbler. Yum!

The Daring Bakers Challenge: March

This month I decided to join the Daring Bakers in making something new and challenging each month. I was hoping it would take me out of my box a little, and BOY did it do just that!! Here's the challenge for this month:

Lasagne of Emilia-Romagna

The March 2009 challenge is hosted by Mary of Beans and Caviar, Melinda of Melbourne Larder and Enza of Io Da Grande. They have chosen Lasagne of Emilia-Romagna from The Splendid Table by Lynne Rossetto Kasper as the challenge.

Not only was this making lasagna from scratch, this was making the ragu sauce from scratch, a bechamel sauce from scratch AND the pasta from scratch! I worked on this for the good part of 7 hours! Fortunately the boys were pretty understanding and only one of them refused to eat it when it was finally done at 8 o'clock at night.
The ragu sauce was definitely my favorite part. It really reminded me of the sauces that were so easy to find in Italy. Much different from the American interpretation of "Italian food". This one started with carrot, celery, onion, pancetta and olive oil. Later you added Italian sausage, beef and proscuitto, wine, broth and then at the very end a couple tomatoes. VERY different from "ragu" from a jar... but oh so yummy!! I'll admit. I ate a few bites before it made it into the lasanga. The bechamel sauce turned out very well. I had never realized that the difference between real Italian lasagna and American lasagna was this sauce. No mozzerella, no ricotta... but bechamel and some parmesean. It took me back home to Italy. Above is the picture I've always wanted. The start of homemade pasta.
I think a couple of the hours I spent on this were on the pasta part alone. It's a spinach pasta. My arms hurt so bad when I was done. Can you imagine trying to turn this heap of crumbly dough into a sheet thin enough to see through?? After a long time and much frustration, the assembled product looked like this in my oven.

Honestly, I will probably never make all this again. I'd skip making the pasta myself and stick with the boxed stuff. The bechamel and ragu might be a special ocassion thing. I wish I could give you all a taste of this ragu. It took forever but I would do it again just for the flavor!
Phil is home now but wasn't when I made this, so he'll have to try the frozen morsel I saved for him some other time. Joshua and I liked this quite a bit. Jeremiah was a little more skeptical. All in all, my lesson learned is that it feels good to try making something new... especially when it's something you were pretty sure you'd never be able to pull off!