Daring Bakers' March Challenge - Lasagne

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.

At first, I was a bit put out by being set a savoury challenge. I do enjoy cooking, but I tend to prefer making cakes and sweet things. However, even though I've never made a lasagne before, let alone hand-rolled my own pasta, I had a lot of fun! It was hard work, but the end result was gorgeous. Soo, guess what? I've decided to join the Daring Cooks as well. :D Here's hoping I'll be able to keep up with 2 challenges a month!

Making the dough:

It was terribly sticky! After adding copious amounts of flour during the rolling process, I managed to get my sheets hanging to dry on the clothes airer:

I cooked the pasta the next day:
Half-assembled lasagne:
Before cooking:
Out of the oven:
Plated:
And finally, the leftovers (which we had the next day):

Mango Chutney

I actually did this back in... January, I think, along with a batch of lemon curd which I didn't get pictures of. Anyway, here's my first venture into the world of condiments!

The ingredients :

Nicely chopped and sorted :
All in the pan :
Halfway there :
Finished! :
And finally, bottled up :

It's very nice in cheese-and-chutney toasties.

Daring Bakers' February Challenge

The February 2009 challenge is hosted by Wendy of WMPE's blog and Dharm of Dad ~ Baker & Chef.
We have chosen a Chocolate Valentino cake by Chef Wan; a Vanilla Ice Cream recipe from Dharm and a Vanilla Ice Cream recipe from Wendy as the challenge.

So, this is my first Daring Baker challenge... and I kinda failed. :P It was fun anyway, though, and I'm definitely going to try ice cream again sometime (i.e. during summer!).

Since I only had a smaller sized bar of chocolate in my cupboard, I halved the recipe (well, more like 2/5thed it) and made muffin-tin sized cakes.

Mmm, melted chocolate mixture...

So, I put it in the oven, then cleverly decided not to set a timer and rather go by the fact that it was 10 mins to the hour... remembered suddenly at twenty past - cakes! Oh no! The mini cakes had been cooking even longer than the big cake should've. *gulp* Suprisingly they weren't totally blackened, so I cut the charred edges off with a small cookie cutter.

What was left:

For the ice-cream, I used this lovely frozen yoghurt recipe from David Lebovitz. Freezing without a special machine was easier than I thought it would be, and I even tried adding some chocolate chips (using chocolate mixture from the cake :3).

The colour isn't great since I'm a cheapo and used tinned strawberries (which are pretty much grey things in red juice). It tasted nice enough anyway, and made up for the dry little cakes. :P