July Daring Baker's Challenge

The July 2010 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Sunita of Sunita’s world – life and food. Sunita challenged everyone to make an ice-cream filled Swiss roll that’s then used to make a bombe with hot fudge. Her recipe is based on an ice cream cake recipe from Taste of Home.-

What a challenge! I think the most challenging aspect of this challenge was making space in my freezer to make this ice cream cake! I've never made swiss rolls or ice cream before so this was a pretty interesting challenge.

I am quite happy with how the swiss rolls turned out! It was a bit daunting at first thinking about rolling the roll but it was actually quite okay and I'm gald it turned out with a pretty decent swirl. Also, the vanilla cream was delicious!

The vanilla and chocolate ice creams were quite straightforward to make and most of the time was spent waiting for them to set in the freezer. I did have some problems with the chocolate ice cream, it took quite long to set, unlike the vanilla ice cream.

Assembling the final bombe was quite fun and I must admit I was a little impatient in assembling each layer of the ice cream and fudge sauce as I was making it for dessert for a dinner party that very night.

I was pretty excited when it came out of the bowl quite easily with the swirl of the swiss rolls preserved nicely!

The chocolate layer of the bombe took quite long to set in the freezer, it was still quite soft after spending about 7 hours in the freezer and we ended up having dessert at midnight!

The layers of the cake turned out pretty well except that the chocolate ice cream later started melting very quickly when I sliced the cake, However the cake was delicious and I am sure my friends felt that it was well worth the wait!

July Daring Cook's Challenge

The July 2010 Daring Cooks’ Challenge was hosted by Margie of More Please and Natashya of Living in the Kitchen with Puppies. They chose to challenge Daring Cooks to make their own nut butter from scratch, and use the nut butter in a recipe. Their sources include Better with Nut Butter by Cooking Light Magazine, Asian Noodles by Nina Simonds, and Food Network online.

It's going to be a short entry this month! I absolutely love nuts! Especially just roasted with some salt! This is my first time making nut butters and I will definitely try some other nuts in the future. I chose to make chicken and pecan cream this time as I have a weakness towards pecans. Absolutely love them. I have never used nuts like that before in a cream for pasta and the product was delectable. I must say the smell wafting from my food processor while processing the roasted pecans was absolutely heavenly!

I am definitely going to make this again and also try out other nut butters in other dishes including desserts. As a side note, here is what I made for dessert, one of my absolute favs after visiting France.

Crème brûlée! Yum.

Until next month!