Daring Bakers - Lavash Crackers

It's Daring Bakers Reveal Day again - I can't believe how quickly it came around! This month, Shellyfish of Musings from the Fishbowl is hosting, and she has chosen a recipe which is quite different from what has gone before. We had to make lavash crackers this month, with vegan dips. There was a fair bit of scope for choice in this challenge, in that you could choose to make your crackers with or without gluten, and sweet or savoury. The dips could be whatever you fancy, as long as they were vegan.

Like city kids who think that milk comes in bottles (or cartons these days - showing my age), I thought that lavash crackers came in boxes, and had never even contemplated that you could make your own. Silly me - a quick Google search revealed that lavash is an ancient Armenian flatbread with Iranian links, and that it has been made for thousands of years. I am pretty sure that the ancient Armenians and Iranians did not pop on down to the local Safeway to pick up a box of lavash.

I decided to make my crackers with gluten, as I already had the right flour. Here is my dough post-knead and pre-rise - it's like a cute little bald head:

I was fascinated by the prospect of being able to make sweet lavash crackers, as it was a concept that I had never come across before. Accordingly, I made half the dough as sweet lavash crackers with cinnamon sugar rolled in:

and the other half savoury with poppy seeds rolled in, like I had purchased many times:

The crackers were great - crispy, crunchy and tasty, but just not enough of them. Don't discount the browner ones - they were the crunchiest, almost like thin potato crisps.

For my vegan dips, I chose to make a sweet potato spread, a beetroot dip and a strawberry dip (consisting of half this recipe plus a 250g tub of non-dairy cream cheese to give it some body):

I was a little hesitant about how the troops at work would take to this rather unusual offering, but they loved it, and cleaned up the dips, the lavash crackers and a box of bought crackers. I was relieved, because I was swimming in an ocean of dips and had no idea what I'd do with them if I had heaps left over.

Now you will have noticed the rather unusual photographs featuring my dips, which are actually photos of photos on my work mobile phone. My troubles began when I decided to skip taking photos of my dips until they were prettily arranged in their serving bowls on a platter beside the crackers. Alas, I served them at work and forgot my digital camera, but being a resourceful chick, I took photos of the dips on my mobile phone, assuming that I would have a USB cable for the phone at home. WRONG! OK, I thought I'd splash out and buy one - unfortunately, this strange phone has a unique kind of USB cable that is so rarely required that I would have had to purchase it online from Nokia at the princely sum of AUD$65. My phone is not connectivity enabled, so my attempts to send the photos to someone else's phone to download failed. Finally, a phone shop sales guy suggested that I buy a bluetooth dongle for my computer to send the photos from my phone directly to my computer. However, for reasons that I won't explain, the purchase turned into the drama from hell, and I left the dongle in the shop with a very sour taste in my mouth. So, I apologise for the quality of the photographic evidence of my dips, but there it is - life is what happens when we are planning something else.

Thanks to Shellyfish for hosting Daring Bakers this month and for teaching me that lavash doesn't come in a box. Do check out some of the other Daring Bakers' lavash crackers by visiting the blogroll here - it is amazing how different the same recipe can turn out in the hands of over a thousand people.