Po - va - teet - sa

Would you ever had guessed a pronunciation of Po-va-teet-sa, from Povitica?? nah me either, but heck it doesn't matter how you pronounce it because its one hell of a tasty Eastern European treat either way! I've never been to Eastern Europe but if this is what I'm gonna get... it's moving up a few places on my endless "Places to Visit" list!

The Daring Bakers' 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!

This bread has been more commonly named, by more common people as swirly bread! I think my attempt at Povitica shows you why:

Délicieux

"The Daring Bakers go retro this month! Thanks to one of our very talented non-­ blogging members, Sarah, the Daring Bakers were challenged to make Croissants using a recipe from the Queen of French Cooking, none other than Julia Child!"


 There was no playing games with this recipe - I followed the entire process to the T (not as my mom taught me which was a much more 'dash of this', 'splash of that', eat half the mixture before its cooked' kind of approach). It was worth every knead, every layer of butter, every long wait between rises, because they were darn delicious!


They were perfectly light and crispy on the outside, buttery and flaky on the inside and divine with some cheese and jam.


The proper camera was in Pretoria with Curtis so I had to make do with my extremely outdated little point and shoot, I think it actually has less megapixels than my phone (which is not of the smart phone variety either!) so the photos don't quite do them justice but here they are anyway... 

Daring Bakers - First Challenge

So after hearing of the elusive Daring Bakers for a while, I went a-searching the interwebs, found their site and after making sure I knew what I was getting myself into, signed up straight away...
It is worth a browse and is loads of fun if you're into baking (and/or cooking, there is a daring Cooks too!)

The blog check-in line for August:

The August 2011 Daring Bakers’ Challenge was hosted by Lisa of Parsley, Sage, Desserts and Line Drive and Mandy of What the Fruitcake?!. These two sugar mavens challenged us to make sinfully delicious candies! This was a special challenge for the Daring Bakers because the good folks at http://www.chocoley.com offered an amazing prize for the winner of the most creative and delicious candy!

I didn't give the chocolate tempering a try yet, but definitely going to give it a bah sometime, especially because I even bought myself a candy thermometer for the Pate de Fruits :) I was so excited, felt like such a granny!

So the first picture is my attempt at Strawberry Pate de Fruit :)

The second picture is of dark chocolate ganache truffles, one with a vanilla powder coating and the other with a white chocolate base and almonds.

 Mmmmm!