Let's Go Nuts for Doughnuts! - October '10 Daring Bakers

Talk about photo-finish. I've been busy trying to get ready for a vacation and then going on vacation that it took me til deadline to actually make the challenge this month.

The October 2010 Daring Bakers challenge was hosted by Lori of Butter Me Up. Lori chose to challenge DBers to make doughnuts. She used several sources for her recipes including Alton Brown, Nancy Silverton, Kate Neumann and Epicurious.

We were also given a choice to make cake doughnuts or yeast doughnuts. I decided to go with Alton Brown's yeast doughnut - one which my son is more familiar with. He would be the one consuming the sinful goodies.

White Bread

We always have bread and usually buy the double loaf sold at Costco. But we ran out and we didn't want to buy another pair of loaves because we are going on vacation real soon. Anyway, I decided it's time I try to bake a loaf of bread.

I found a great recipe from Allrecipes.com with almost 2,000 5-star reviews - can't go wrong with that, right? I started at around 8:30pm, it was ready by 11pm. And yes, my son smelled the freshly baked bread and wanted to eat that late. I, of course, restrained myself.

Flower Pot Cake

Here's a really nice cake for Mother's Day or for a garden-theme party or for whatever occasion a flower pot cake would be a perfect fit. You can change the kind of fondant flowers you can put on the flower pot depending on the flower cutters you have or if you can pipe your flowers directly on the cake, even better. But since I've confessed that I'm not really good with piping anything, I'd stick with fondant flowers. In this case, daisies. I just made a few flowers in advance. I think about 12 or 15. Then on the day of serving the cake, I just placed them on top of the cake.

I made this cake for my mother-in-law's birthday. To create the pot shape,  I just baked my cake on a Pyrex 2-Cup measuring cup. I didn't think I'd be writing a blog when I made my first cakes. I wish I  took step-by-step photos. But I'll try to be descriptive as possible.

Here's how I did it.