Daring Baker's Challenge: Lemon Cream Cheese Quick Bread

Oh hey, how are you blog?

This semester has been crazy - I'm working tons of hours and I still have class and Journal to attend to, so it's been wild! But, it's starting to relax a little, so that's good! I decided to do this month's Daring Bakers' Challenge, because I've embarrassingly missed the last two. Last month, in all fairness, was biscuits - I have baked way more than my fair share of those!

The Daring Bakers’ February 2012 host was – Lis! Lisa stepped in last minute and challenged us to create a quick bread we could call our own. She supplied us with a base recipe and shared some recipes she loves from various websites and encouraged us to build upon them and create new flavor profiles.

I decided to make a lemon bread that is reminiscent of a bread we used to get at my job in Ann Arbor. Everyday that we had interviews, we would get breakfast pastries catered in for the corporate recruiters. There were always croissants, which had been baked the day before and consequently tasted pretty sad - we used to joke that they must be fat free! My favorite thing was a lemon poppy seed bread with a strip of cream cheese filling through the middle. This bread is like that, though I must admit, the bread at work was better!

Lemon Cream Cheese Bread (Adapted from Land O Lakes) - Makes 2 Loaves

• 2 c sugar 
• 1 c unsalted butter (softened)
• 4 eggs
• 1c milk
• 6 TBSP lemon juice
• 3 1/2 C flour
• 2 tsp baking powder 
• 1/2 tsp salt 
• 8 oz cream cheese (softened)
• 6 TBSP powdered sugar
• 1 egg 

1. Preheat oven to 350. 
2. Cream together butter and sugar. Add eggs, one at a time, and beat until smooth. 
3.  Add in the milk and lemon juice and mix until combined.
4. Mix in flour, salt, and baking powder. Mix together until well-combined. 
5. For the filling, cream together the cream cheese, powdered sugar, and egg until smooth.
6. Pour one quarter of the batter into the bottom of two greased loaf pans. Pour half or the filling into each loaf pan. Pour the rest of the batter over the tops of each loaf.
7. Bake for 50 minutes to an hour. Let rest for at least then minutes, and then turn out of the pan to cool. 

Daring Baker's Challenge: Sans Rival Cake

I made this delicious cake for Thanksgiving. I wasn't planning to bake it, but then my step-mom asked me to bring something chocolate to Thanksgiving, so that was that.

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. The Bibingka cake was a little to crazy for my family, so the sans rival cake was a much better match.

This cake takes 10 eggs! The cake layers are meringue with ground cashews and cocoa folded in. The frosting is made from half of the left-over egg yolks and is an extremely rich French buttercream. It was my first time making butter cream in this way and it was difficult but ultimately worth the effort.

I don't know if I'll make this again, just because it was so labor intensive. But, it was a fun thing to bring for the holidays and everyone enjoyed it.

Daring Baker's Challenge: Povitica

The Daring Baker’s October 2011 challenge was Povitica, hosted by Jenni of The Gingered Whisk. Povitica is a traditional Eastern European Dessert Bread that is as lovely to look at as it is to eat!

The Daring Baker's Challenge will be a new monthly feature on my blog! This is my first month participating, and every month there will be a new challenge that I will post on the 27th of the month.

This bread is insanely complicated and I now understand why the Croatian grandma I saw in a YouTube video said she made them loaves in batches of twelve. I only made one loaf, which had a traditional walnut filling, and it was quite labor intensive. It is a yeast dough, which I tend to struggle with, but it actually came together quite easily. I had a harder time rolling the dough out thinly enough to get enough beautiful layers inside. The recipe suggested you roll the dough out on a bed sheet, which I did. Felt kind of weird, but it was quite effective.

This bread was really addictive and delicious. I thought, oh, this bead is just okay, but then I couldn't leave it alone. I am now trying to come up with some filling variations. I'd like to incorporate apple butter into my next one, as I have a fresh batch a friend made for me!