January Daring Bakers Challenge: O Canada!

The January 2010 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Lauren of Celiac Teen. Lauren chose Gluten-Free Graham Wafers and Nanaimo Bars as the challenge for the month. The sources she based her recipe on are 101 Cookbooks and www.nanaimo.ca. 

I'm a day late, so I'm going to get right into it.  The first challenge was to make graham wafers/crackers from scratch.  I struggle with baking in general as I am largely more into the creative process and less into exact measurements.  That's why I do these challenges.  Needless to say, my graham crackers came out less than perfect, although this time I'm not 100% sure where I failed.

I prepared the dough with all-purpose flour (I skipped the gluten-free aspect of the challenge this time around) and exactly as the instructions indicated.  The first place I might have run up against an issue was that my 1-inch cubes of butter were not quite so precise.  They were a bit bigger and not super even.  I had a hard time mixing the dough due to the frozen blocks of butter sending things flying.

I set the dough to chill overnight and came back to it the next day.  Here's where I knew there was a problem.  The dough was pretty sticky as suggested, but not all that wet and was in fact crumbling under my rolling pin.   As such, I couldn't quite get it rolled out to the 1/8 inch thickness indicated in the recipe.

That said, my graham crackers came out as pretty tasty graham cookies that my husband gobbled up freely before I reminded him that there was more to come and I needed at least some crumbs leftover

The second part of the challenge was to turn our graham crumbs into Nanaimo Bars which apparently are a hit in Canada.  I'd heard of these creatures and they look decadent, so gladly took on the challenge.

I must say that this part of the challenge turned out remarkably better than the graham cracker portion.  I had two issues, neither of which stopped me from making a decent Nanaimo Bar.  The first was that I'm really trying to focus on getting healthy and eating "clean" and preparing the bars really brings home the amount of butter that I had to soften to room temperature.  The second issue was that when I hear 8x8x2 pan, I use this one specific pan that we have.  But it's really more like 8x9x3 roughly.  The ingredients probably fit perfectly in an 8x8x2 pan, but I had some problems with the pudding mixture, so it ended up more thin than some of the lovely pictures that I saw on others final posts.

Alas, these minor issues not withstanding, it all came together.  After I spread the cocoa, butter, sugar, coconut, hazelnut (I have a potential almond allergy that I don't like to push) and graham crumbs mixture in and topped that with pudding butter and melted chocolate, I came up with a cute little Nanaimo Bar.  They were tasty.  Very sweet.  Very un-"clean".  But a nice little indulgence  And I figure that the thin layers mean that maybe my version is not quite so bad after all!