This month's Daring Baker's Challenge was a straight up FAIL. I don't have a lot of failures in the kitchen when I'm baking, but this was just a failure, in all capital letters.This month we made strudel. If you aren't familiar with strudel, how you make it is by making a dough, then stretching that dough until it's so thin you can read a newspaper through it, or so I'm told. Then you brush the dough with melted butter, roll it up around a delicious filling, and bake it. The dough puffs up, like puff pastry, and it's wonderful. The trick to strudel dough is developing the gluten in your dough to get it to stretch so thin you can see through it. Now, I don't know if you know this, but I can't eat gluten. If you didn't know that, welcome to my blog. I tried to make a strudel dough, but it ended up really just being a pie crust. Other gluten free Daring Bakers experienced this, and I haven't yet looked at my Reader and read other posts.
If I was making a strudel, I failed. If I was making an interesting rolled up pie, I might have succeeded, if only I had cooked my filling ahead of time. The recipe I used had me bake the strudel for 20 minutes at 400. After 20 minutes, it was totally not done. I cooked it another 20, and then the crust was done, but not the filling. If I had cooked it any longer, I would have burned the crust. I gave up. I am planning a wedding and entertaining my Hungarian mother-in-law (I can call her that, even though I won't be married for another week and a half, right?), I don't have the time to try and try and try to make this work. I hope you guys had more success than I did.
If you're interested, the filling I made was a chocolate pear filling, that might have been delicious if it had cooked through (recipe I kind of followed is here) Also, I forgot to add eggs, and added some rum, which also didn't cook out at all. Yuck. Bummer. At least I like how my pictures turned out. I also had planned to make some sort of spinach-feta version, but gave up after one attempt. Sorry guys.The May Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Linda of make life sweeter! and Courtney of Coco Cooks. They chose Apple Strudel from the recipe book Kaffeehaus: Exquisite Desserts from the Classic Cafés of Vienna, Budapest and Prague by Rick Rodgers.
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