.daring cooks challenge: november.

Dave and Linda from Monkeyshines in the Kitchen chose soufflés as our November Daring Cooks' challenge! Dave and Linda provided two of their own delicious recipes plus a sinfully decadent chocolate soufflé recipe adapted from Gordan Ramsay's recipe found at the BBC Good Food website. Being difficult, as I'm prone to do, however, I decided on a crab and cheese soufflé recipe I found here.

I was extremely glad I did. But I'm also now eager to try so many more flavor variations.

The rumor near and far is that soufflés are complicated. They are said to be the diva of the culinary world. I think the truth is as far from that as possible. Yes, making the soufflé was a little bit complicated, you have to do everything in the correct order. You have to make sure the roux thickens just so. The egg whites needs to be perfectly stiff. You have to fold everything ever so delicately. Really though, I didn't handle any of the ingredients with kid gloves. I just got in there and made it happen.

As a result, I got 4 beautiful and petite soufflés.

And then I had so much extra mixture I got this little fella out of it too! Bonus buy.

One issue the man and I found was that the first tiny soufflés didn't have much crab in them. My guess is that I just got a lot of the egg mixture in my scooper when I was doling those out. Then the larger soufflé had a ton of crab in it, which was quite tasty. Also, because of the different sizes, there were different cook times. I put everything in the oven together, on a baking sheet, then after 25 minutes took the smaller ramekins out of the oven and continued to cook the larger dish for another 15 minutes. This did the trick and everything came out delicious, done and didn't collapse! I was pretty thrilled with myself, truth be told.

The man gave me a fist bump and told me I done good.

Next up: a chocolate soufflé!

XO