Daring Bakers: Panna Cotta and Florentine Cookies

For this months Daring Bakers we were challenged to make a two part dessert. The first part was a panna cotta. If you don't know what panna cotta is - it is a creamy dessert with just three main ingredients:

• milk / cream
• sugar
• gelatin

There may be a couple of other ingredients but it is basically just a milk jello - but we don't call it that since it doesn't sound as good as panna cotta. I have made panna cotta before so I decided to take the recommendation in the challenge and add a fruit gelee. This was going to be used for my Valentine's day dessert so I needed a red fruit and for some reason I decide to go with the $5.00 for 7oz raspberries.

The panna cotta came out like it should - nice and creamy. I think the honey was a nice touch for a little flavor. After last months dessert where I used gelatin three times without much of a recipe to go on you would think making a little gelee would not be much of a problem. It was. I followed the recipe (only using raspberries) but my gelee thickened way to much and was pretty much inedible. Kind of ashame to waste most of those raspberries.

The cookies were my favorite part of the challenge. These were from a Nestle recipe and also very easy to make. I just got a silpat and I was excited to try that out on this recipe. I did have a little trouble with the first batch. It turns out when the recipe says to use 1 Tablespoon of the dough on the cookie sheet you should not make them a little bigger. I probably put 4 teaspoons and I put nine of them on my first sheet. The cookies are very thin after they are cooked and they all ran together. On my next batch when I went to an even tablespoon and only cooking six at a time it worked perfect. I am a big fan of oatmeal cookies. These are not really like a normal oatmeal cookie but still very good. They are thin and they get a little caramelized when cooking. Even though they are thin they are still soft and chewy. I don't normally like chocolate chips in my oatmeal cookies but when these are sandwiched with the chocolate it adds just the right amount of chocolate.

Thanks to Mallory of A Sofa in the Kitchen for this months challenge. Nice and simple but a perfect Valentine's day dessert. This months challenge with all the recipes used can be downloaded here.

Make sure to check out my next post on March 14. I have decided to join the other half of the Daring Kitchen - the Daring Cooks. I am sure I will have a lot of fun with the cooking challenges - hopefully Lara will be able to eat some of the more exotic things I will probably end up making.