Decision
When I read about the competition, my first thought was "nah, I can't really bake anything exceptional" but then I got an idea. What if I made a blue pizza with the Ace logo made out of cheese?!? So that is how I chose my recipe.
I used Trello to help me plan and execute. In the beginning the Trello board was more about listing up the ingredients and making sure the procurement process was streamlined. So my columns were: Ingredient, Needs Procurement, Procured, and Done. I listed up all the ingredients and moved them to proper column. My Needs Procurement column became my shopping list.
When all ingredients had been securely and verifiably brought into my kitchen, I arranged my Trello card in order of dough ingredients. After the dough was made, I moved all these into the column Done and then arranged the rest of the cards in order of application. BBQ sauce was first, then cheese. After that all the other toppings.
Recipe
The recipe is quite simple but very good. The dough from this recipe is excellent, especially if you let it rise 2-3 times between kneading. Below is a picture of the ingredients for the dough.
The dough recipe
250 gr flour
1 tsp sugar
1/2 tsp salt
150 ml water
1 & 1/2 tsp yeast
food coloring of choice (don't just make blue ones, go for the red and green this Christmas season!)
Mix the water and yeast. Let the yeast dissolve and "bubble".
Mix the dry ingredients together and form a hole at the bottom of the bowl.
Pour in the water mix into the hole and knead.
Let is rise for 45 min or so and knead again. Repeat 1-2 more times, if you have time, to extra airy dough.
Toppings
Of course you can choose your very own but what I put on it was.
G Hughes sugar free BBQ original sauce
High quality pepperoni
Bacon
Minced garlic
Then I put Olive oil on the sides (crust)
Bake it at 425°F for about 12 min or so (depends on how thin you roll out the dough and also how soft/crisp you want the bottom to be).
Highs and Lows
Well, it started off really well off with the dough taking on a beautiful blue as the background to Ace. Here you can see the water, yeast, and blue food coloring mixed together. Isn't that just gorgeous?!?
And as you can see in this picture, the building of the logo was looking good.
However at this point I started thinking: what about the other toppings? After a deliberation with my team mate (my daughter), I took the executive decision to cover the logo up with toppings and put extra cheese over it all (like done in Iceland - cheese is on top!). So my creation drastically changed but that is ok because we are very agile in our methodology. We just rearranged the topping cards in the Procured column in Trello to reflect that change. Easy enough because Trello is such an awesome tool.
Another kink in the road was that when a blue pizza dough is baked with the olive oil on the crust/ends, it does change its color. Here the pizza is just about going into the oven with beautifully oiled ends (which are about to become tasty crust).
Final Creation
Here is the final outcome, quite ugly to be honest. Turned into a Quasimodo. Guess too much cheese tends to "crawl"...
But as with Quasimodo, I still love my blue pizza - imperfections and all! It did taste very sweet and actually really good. (But then again, bacon and BBQ sauce make everything heavenly). So don't judge the book by its cover... The crust was amazing and the sweetness of the BBQ sauce balanced the "blue taste" so... No kidding, food coloring does not have any taste. Seriously though, I can't think why I didn't start making blue pizzas sooner!
