I recently joined The Daring Kitchen, which challenges members to cook a specific thing each month in either or both of two categories
- Daring Cooks, which tends to be about savoury dishes; and
- Daring Bakers, which is often more sweet based.

Members may not reveal the details of the challenge or their pictures until the agreed reveal date - which is the 27th of November for this Challenge. Pictures from the Daring Bakers and the recipe will be posted on their site in the next day or so.

Daring Bakers November challenge was to cook Paris-Brest, a beautiful pastry celebrating the Paris-Brest bicycle race. It is basically a circle of choux pastry, filled with a creme patisserie or similar.

Pastry making has always scared me a bit and so I had not made choux pastry since I moved out of my mother's house.

I had two goes at making the Paris-Brest and found that choux pastry is not terribly difficult to make and that it is impossible to make more Paris-Brests than people will devour - they are seriously yummy!

Both versions have a basic vanilla creme patisserie and strawberries, one with a chocolate glaze the other with toasted almond flakes and powdered sugar.

My family has demanded I make these for Xmas.