The February 2009 challenge is hosted by Wendy of WMPE's blog and Dharm of Dad ~ Baker & Chef.We have chosen a Chocolate Valentino cake by Chef Wan; a Vanilla Ice Cream recipe from Dharm and a Vanilla Ice Cream recipe from Wendy as the challenge.


I had fun this month, even though my posting might contradict this.

I knew immediately I was going to make my Mexican Chocolate Ice Cream. So I thought I might want to try to do this cake with white chocolate. I had a potluck at my SnB and decided that would be the day to showcase my work. Alas, my "white chocolate" burned when I tried to melt it. Errg! So, a week later, I tried again. I got the White chocolate to melt, but the cake ended up looking and tasting like a really sweet omelette--Yuck!

At this point I realized the "white chocolate" I was using was actually not really white chocolate--it had no cocoa butter in it (the definition of true white chocolate). So I gave up and went extra dark bittersweet.



And it worked beautifully. Here it is getting ready to go to the SnB.

It had actually started snowing so I felt the snowflake was appropriate.

Here's my ice-cream:


I used almost 1 1/2 Tablespoons of chili powder--I even pulled out the big guns I got in Santa Fe. It was snowing and I thought it would be easier to eat icecream if it had more heat in it.

So I'm all proud of myself, bringing treats to the SnB, and giving a fond farewell to a fellow knitter who gets to live on Mount Rainier for a year, when this woman comes in--carrying a cake.

Needless to say, it's good there were lots of women there. There was a lot of chocolate. The other cake tasted much better than mine, but my ice cream was pretty stellar.

What I learned:

• read your labels
• I had never made a flourless cake before--not my favorite
• I make kick a$$ ice cream