A – Z Baking Around the World

A to Z Baking around the world – This is the chosen theme for the April Mega Blogging Marathon which is also the 75th edition of this event!!

Every year, we, a group fun loving and challenge crazy food bloggers, do a month long thematic blogging marathon . The months of April and September are set aside for this. We blog for 26 days, with the Sundays off.

Apart from these two months, we do regular blogging marathons of 3 days / week monthly marathon.

So when the topic for this mega marathon was decided, every one including me were doing a happy dance. And as it always happens, some rules were set to make this edition even more interesting and challenging!

Guidelines for the Mega BM are below

• We need to do A to Z by dish name and from different countries.
• You can repeat countries twice
• Both native names or English names for the dishes are fine.
• Adjectives are not allowed to be used more than 2 times (you can use for Q, X, Z.)
• It can be anything baked, sweets, savories, snacks, casseroles, cakes, breads etc.
• Microwave baking is not allowed. All your bakes should be done in Convection Oven only.
• Majority cooking time needs to be done in Oven, not the last 10 minutes
• For a single day, there can only be 3 posts.

With each of these rules being thought and bakes being selected, the list went through a lot of changes.

I even made sub themes for week and everything looked doable since we had almost a year to prepare.But as it always happens I don’t start cooking / baking as soon as teh list is made!!

At one point of time, I even told the gang that I would not be participating due to some personal reasons. But Srivalli and Vaishali, along with the rest of the gang, made sure that I did not miss this special edition.

In fact I have never missed a mega marathon and no matter how unprepared I am[which happens most of the times!], I have never even thought of sitting out of a mega edition.

A fresh list was made to accommodate easy peesy bakes. Just before a week, during one of the whatsapp chats, it was mentioned that a country cannot be repeated more than once!

I ran to my list and to my horror, 90% of bakes on the list were from the U.S. or the U.K. Disheartened, I went about changing the list and it was like learning history and geography all over again.

The kids seeing me pouring over the alphabets, the country name list, baking books and other stuffs surely knew I was up to something for the blog. By now they know that this much of preparation is surely going to be something good for the mega BM!

Finally, until yesterday morning, I was still half minded – wondering if I should join or sit this one out.The final push came from Srivalli who talked around the various reasons for which I was opting out and convinced me to do this challenge.

Thanks my dear friends! If not for this push, I would have never attempted to bake some of the dishes that I have listed out.

No, I am not sharing the list here. I am hoping to see you all here everyday, starting tomorrow, to have a look at the bakes that I have decided on.

I have just started baking a couple of dishes for this event and hoping to bake and post the remaining ones on time everyday.Fingers crossed…

I will see you around tomorrow with the first bake of the series..

Until then…