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. 

 Homemade graham crackers

This month the Daring Bakers Challenge consisted of two parts. One, to make homemade graham crackers and two, to use those graham crackers in Nanaimo Bars. Nanaimo (Nah-nye moh) Bars are a Canadian dessert from British Columbia, where the 2010 Winter Olympics will be held in just a few weeks. They consist of three layers: a base of graham crackers, coconut, nuts, and cocoa, a custard layer, and a topping of chocolate.

Making graham craker crumbs

Part of the challenge was to make the graham crackers gluten-free and while it would have been good to know how to work with gluten-less flours, I didn’t want to make an extra trip to the grocery store and so I cheated and used all purpose flour instead. I am a huge fan of graham crackers and I was very pleasantly surprised by how close these crackers came to tasting like the real thing. They were really good. So good in fact that I had a hard time grinding them up for the Nanaimo Bars.

The Nanaimo Bars were just okay in my opinion, although others who sampled them enjoyed them quite a bit. I would have rather just eaten all the graham crackers, but that’s just me. I like the idea of the Nanaimo Bars and I may try playing around with the recipe to see if I can improve it to my tastes.

If you are interested in more details of January’s Daring Bakers Challenge, visit the Daring Baker’s website.