This morning, I completed June’s Daring Bakers challenge, the Danish braid, because we don’t have enough carbs in the house. What with the cake, the biscuits, the Tuesdays with Dorie scones. If not for Simply Orange, we’d have scurvy.

There are three things you should know if you decide to make this Danish braid:

1. The entire process takes at least eight hours. The dough rests in the fridge for five. So, you’ll need to set aside an afternoon or evening to prep the dough. The process isn’t all that intense, but you’ll be rolling and folding the dough four times, with 30-minute breaks in between. Plenty of time to catch up on the laundry, take a multivitamin, or watch way too much Law and Order. Guess which one I did.

2. If you’ve neither seen nor eaten a Danish braid before, it’s basically a glorified Hot Pocket® with buttery, flaky layers. You can fill it with roughly a cup of anything you like: ham and cheese, apples and almonds, Nutella and hazelnuts, spinach and feta, cherries and cream cheese. The dough recipe you’ll find at the end of this post makes two Danish braids. My first was cinnamon, sugar, and toasted pecans. The second was pepperoni, ricotta, mozzarella, Parmesan, and basil. If you decide to make a savory braid, use the given dough recipe, but leave out the orange zest, cardamom, vanilla, and orange juice.

3. The braiding is no big deal. A Danish braid is a laminated dough. Instead of combining the butter and a flour mixture, you keep them separate and fold the butter between the layers of dough. Your first one or two turns of the dough might look pretty ragged; just keep going. With every turn, the dough will get smoother. And, if you can lace your shoes, you can braid this dough.

Once you’re done, you’ll have two rich, buttery braids that look impressive, taste delicious, and contain 100 percent of your daily allowance of vitamins and minerals. And by “vitamins and minerals,” I mean butter. Enjoy!

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Can you hear her?

Off in the distance, the fat lady is singing.

Yes, a mere hour from the deadline, I have completed my first Daring Bakers Challenge: an opera cake.

A traditional opera cake has layers of sponge cake, coffee buttercream, ganache, and a final glaze of chocolate. They’re usually decorated with a musical symbol, the word “L’Opera,” or a name – “Clichy.” Louis Clichy introduced the cake at the Exposition Culinaire in Paris in 1903.

The DB Challenge was to create a nontraditional opera cake: no chocolate, no coffee, no dark colors.

I decided on almond sponge cake moistened with vanilla syrup and topped with raspberry buttercream, framboise (aka Razzmatazz), and a white chocolate glaze.

Certifiably Daring Bakerish.

Unfortunately, the first sponge cake was a rubbery abomination. So flat you could roll it into a tube.

The second cake was perfect, but the fluffy pink raspberry buttercream tasted like a 3-day-old sink sponge.

The third cake had raw spots. The meringue deflated. The buttercream looked like cottage cheese. And the white chocolate chips wouldn’t melt.

I was ready to chuck the challenge. I was out of almonds. I didn’t think I liked cake anymore.

But this morning, I rallied. I didn’t want to wait another month to be a Daring Baker. I mean, have you seen the logo? It’s cute.

So, less than two hours from the close of Reveal Day, here are my mini opera cakes. I’m officially a Daring Baker!

The dirty dishes can wait.

P.S. The Daring Bakers are dedicating this month’s challenge to Barbara of Winos and Foodies. Barbara is the force behind “A Taste of Yellow,” a food blogging event that supports Lance Armstrong’s LiveSTRONG foundation.

Does the world need another food blog?

Today the LA Times ran an article classifying blogs by home cooks as “cyber-treacle,” with writers “nattering about what they fed their boyfriends last night, or fuzzily photographing their latest batch of heart-shaped cookies.”

Ouch.

The Times writer prefers blogs written by chefs, who tend “to focus on the story behind the food, on the thought process that original cooking entails.”

In the article, she eventually recognizes that chef-written blogs also can be extremely self-promotional, restaurant-promotional, product-promotional, and (most likely) not written by the chefs whose names are on the blogs. But she lets the insults about home cooks’ food blogs stand.

Really, there are so many good ones. Lovely, informative, helpful, funny. From the practical to the practically pornographic.

And I like to know what they fed their boyfriends last night.

So, what am I going to bring to the proverbial table?

I recently left my position as head pastry chef at a German bakery to get married, move, introduce Henry the dog (mine) to Henry the cat (his), unpack, write thank-you notes, lose my way around town, dance in the kitchen, figure out the TV remotes, unpack some more, commandeer some closet space, and watch “Lost.”

Now, it’s time to figure out what’s next. I’m thinking cake design.
In the meantime, I plan to reach out. Professional cooking can be a competitive sport, where recipes, ingredients, and techniques are guarded, always by understanding and sometimes by contract. Now that I’m a chef-turned-home-cook (a home chef?), I want to drop the competition and be part of a community. Sharing sounds good.

So, this is my space for trying new things and sharing the results. To bake from some of my long-ignored cookbooks. To pass along my favorite recipes. And to join the family of “nattering” food bloggers.

Heart-shaped cookies for everyone!