King Arthur Flour Blog & Bake 2012 - Part 1

I was lucky enough to be invited to the King Arthur Flour Blog & Bake this year, and I am so honored and excited...  We have all decided that it's more of a baker's retreat than a blogger conference... just totally fantastic.

DAY 1:

The first day started with a great recipe writing workshop, featuring Susan G. Purdy.  We learned about the basics of successful recipe writing, and we got to do some experimentation...  we were split into two groups, and each group was given a tray of ingredients and told to cook something with it, and write a recipe down that the other group could then follow to successfully recreate the same dish...

King Arthur Flour's new education center... the classroom was fantastic!

You know you are hanging with other food bloggers when everyone has a camera.. Rashmi from Primlani Kitchen was busy plating..

My group got to create a recipe for French toast.  We ended up making Cinnamon Kissed French Toast with Raspberry Coulis.  It was actually really delicious, especially for something that 7 cooks came up with together on the spot.

Our French toast creation..

Matt from Thyme in Our Kitchen, writing down our recipe

The other group was able to recreate our recipe pretty faithfully, though we had a couple of mistakes in our recipe, and we had a few places that could use some improvement, for sure, in the writing style particularly.

Working on the chicken, with Julie from Mommie Cooks

Sauce looking pretty yummy

Nice fork-filled presentation..

When we got to cook from the other group's recipe, there were some hurdles... they had a time crunch and didn't get their recipe transcribed correctly, so we had to improvise (but, that's one thing that I do well!), so we ended up with a really delicious final product, which tasted a lot like the original dish... so I think it was a roaring success all around!

Beautiful apple swan

Delicious cheeses and crackers

Brie!!

After our workshop, we headed over to the Norwich Inn for a cocktail hour, with fantastic house brewed beer and "heavy appetizers."  They were so delicious.  And the beer... it's wonderful.  I'll have to get some to bring home.  It's brewed in house, so it's really something special...

House brewed Porter.  Wow.

A "flight" - sampler of beers.  I liked all of them... (And the tiny glasses are adorable.  Right up my alley..)

Bruschetta!

Mini crab cake!

Some brie and other dip, homemade chips... so good

Chicken with sweet & sour sauce... so good.

A small group of us went out afterwards to Yama in Hanover, NH, about 7 minutes away, tops... since I have a bottomless pit of a sushi tummy, I had a couple delicious rolls.

a roll with mango (dubbed the "Tropical roll" and a "caterpillar roll"

I could eat this all day

So that's it for the first day, as after the sushi, we returned back to the inn and I fell into (the very nice) bed... stay tuned for posts on days 2 and 3!!