Whew…last minute!

I had my Daring Bakers challenge in my to-do list last weekend but plans changed because the fiance came over for the weekend to surprise me. What can you do, eh? Haha.

So last night, after making a dinner of tuna beet salad with homemade mayo (because I ran out!) and already invested on a lot of elbow grease for that mayo, I stretched the dough for the strudel:

And let me tell you now that it was a lot of work and it tested my patience. After a while of gently coaxing the dough to stretch…stretch a little more…go on…I almost went into this Zen-like phase of going around the dough to stretch it. It was very meditative until I tear my first teeny hole.  Have I told you before that I’m a perfectionist? After that I got too cautious and I guess that made my dough not as thin as it should be, but I swear I can see the threads of my cotton fabric at the bottom very clearly.

These delicious Rainier cherries from the Granville Island market made it into the strudel:

And so did the raspberries I got there, too. I added a tiny bit of dried cranberries to soak up the extra juice from the raspberries. I’m not going to admit that I was eating while preparing them. Mmm.

I rolled it and slathered it with butter. Perhaps too much butter, I know. But one cannot have enough of it!

After about 37 minutes, I took out the strudel and waited for another half hour before slicing. It kept falling apart while I sliced it, but it did taste good!

It’s not the most photogenic (cooked) dish on earth and I wish I could give you a bite to make it better. Next time I think I’ll use white sugar instead of my trying-to-be-healthy choice of raw sugar to make it less dark. What do you think? Perhaps the raspberries were a bad idea because they become goo. I don’t know…but it sure was yummy.

I’ll post the recipe tomorrow!

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The May Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Linda of make life sweeter! and Courtney of Coco Cooks. They chose Apple Strudel from the recipe book Kaffeehaus: Exquisite Desserts from the Classic Cafés of Vienna, Budapest and Prague by Rick Rodgers. — Many thanks to Courtney and Linda for the challenge. It was indeed a challenge! :D