Daring Bakers- Lavash Crackers and Almond Spread

This is my first month with the Daring Bakers and I am a day late in posting…hopefully I will not be kicked out (fingers crossed)!  I have to admit that I wasn’t too thrilled that my inaugural challenge would be vegan crackers.  Anyway, I warmed up to the cracker idea since it would be something I had never done before.  I have never had good luck with bread dough and all the kneading involved, so I was nervous about this part of the cracker.  I chose to be a little lazy and let Kitchen Aid’s dough hook do the kneading for me.  Then I let it rise.  

Rolling out the dough to a paper thin sheet wasn’t easy.  The second half of the dough rolled much easier as it had some time to rest.  Sarah rolled her dough out much better and they really crisped well.

I made the mistake of not reading the part about spraying the dough with a little water before sprinkling salt and spices.  As a result all the fennel and caraway seeds came tumbling onto the baking sheet instead of sticking to the cracker.  Sad day.

 

    

The Tahitian Almond dipping sauce sounded really interesting so I decided to give it a try.  Almond butter, pine nuts, garlic, cilantro, orange juice and honey.  Unfortunately, I couldn’t find almond butter at my small town grocery, AND I forgot to get orange juice.  Carrie the problem solver to the rescue!!  Well, kind of.  I figured that almond butter was nothing more than ground almonds, so I decided to make my own almond butter in the food processor…not so easy.

It kinda came to a butter-ish consistency so I continued on using water instead of orange juice…hmmm.  Maybe I should have been better prepared and used a little more common sense.  Lesson learned.

 

 

After all was said and done my sister Sarah and my husband Ben said they thought it was a success.  I may not make my own crackers again.  I am just fine to go to the store and settle for a box of water crackers.  I am glad that I was, in a way, forced to try them.  I will probably try to make the spread again with the ingredients the recipe calls for.  Maybe then it won’t look quite so much like green sludge.