Cupcake Chemistry
Understanding the Basics of Baking, Decorating, and Food PhotographyArchive for Diary
Math + Baking = Anti-Recipe
I am immediately going to go grab this book.
I have a similar book, Bakewise, that describes how to scan a recipe and instantly know whether it will be too dry, too flat, to heavy, etc. Most times when I bake cupcakes I change up the frosting based on how well it works with the particular density, flavor, and client (and sometimes whether just depending on how lazy I am and what is in my cabinet).
Thank you Maura for the heads up on the article!
One Part Creativity: Zero Parts Recipe
Can just using ratios really teach me to be a better cook?
(By Jennifer Reese)
“There are hundreds of thousands of recipes out there, but few of them help you to be a better cook in any substantial way,” Michael Ruhlman writes in the preface to his fascinating and pompous new book, Ratio. “In fact, they may hurt you as a cook by keeping you chained to recipes.” Ruhlman calls Ratio an “anti recipe book, a book that teaches you and frees you from the need to follow.” He argues that once you’ve memorized certain “bedrock” culinary ratios, you can cook virtually anything without resorting to a cookbook.
I read Ratio cover to cover one afternoon, and I rolled my eyes. Like many of us who lack an Italian grandmother or a culinary school education, I taught myself to cook with recipes. Ruhlman is dead wrong about one thing: Recipes can help you become a better cook in a very substantial way. From following instructions, you learn technique. From watching how ingredients are paired, you develop an intuitive sense of what flavors work together.
Marjorie Williams and Sarah Lyall bantered about the best all-purpose cookbooks. Sara Dickerman reviewed the big ones and then picked the best recipes from the cookbook of all cookbooks, Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking. For the habits of Julia herself, check out her “Diary” from 2000, in which she reveals her favorite breakfast—bacon, eggs, and toast.
Moreover, the underlying message irritated me. It’s no longer good enough to make a pecan pie from the Joy of Cooking? We have to be artists now? I’m an experienced cook who improvises plenty and is fairly good at it, but I view recipes like I do Mapquest directions: They’re a useful tool that generally take me where I want to go. Why would I want to “unchain” myself?
Nonetheless, there’s something extremely beguiling about Ruhlman’s idea that all you need in order to cook magnificently are a handful of simple, elegant formulas. I began to wonder if his ratios might liberate my inner Ferran Adrià—if I even have one. Is there really, as Ruhlman argues, “no end” to what you can cook when you know a ratio? I decided to take his premise for a test-drive.
The first thing you’ll notice if you start trying to cook with ratios is that they are not as marvelously simple as Ruhlman implies. Ratios, Ruhlman writes “allow you to close the book and cook as you wish.” But while his seductively spare table of 33 culinary ratios fits neatly on two introductory pages, it is followed by some 200 pages of caveats, fine print, and explications of technique. You need a book to learn to cook without a book? No thanks. If the goal was to “close the book,” I was closing the book. I copied out the ratios and put Ratio away.
I decided to start with cookies (1 part sugar: 2 parts fat: 3 parts flour). Ruhlman advises beginning with an utterly plain sugar-butter-flour cookie, an exercise that will “instruct the thoughtful cook about … the nature of a cookie.” So-called essence of cookie took approximately 1 minute to mix, 20 minutes to bake, and tasted like the most boring shortbread you’ve ever eaten, which is to say, not too damned bad. Those were my thoughts about “the nature of a cookie.” Apparently, I’m not a very thoughtful cook.
To the next batch of dough I added vanilla and substituted palm sugar for white. Palm sugar: a misguided purchase that sat in my cupboard for months attracting ants. Not anymore! Palm sugar is the slightly funky-tasting granulated sap of the coconut palm, and it yielded swarthy, earthy, terrific shortbread. I was delighted. In the space of the next few manic hours I baked crispy Brazil nut shortbread (great), rye shortbread studded with candied ginger (not great), and brown sugar shortbread packed with dates (almost great). The defeats were as interesting as the failures, and my mind was whirring. Why weren’t those ginger cookies tastier? (Too much ginger.) How could I have made them better? (Less ginger; try brown sugar.) I found myself lying in bed that night mulling new cookie flavors. It was like playing with paper dolls, creating crazy new outfits for my naked cookie ratio.
Unfortunately, it’s hard to advance beyond shortbread with the 1-2-3 ratio, and I eventually grew restless. You can make only so many butter-rich, not-too-sweet cookies before you want to move on to something altogether different. But you can’t easily extrapolate snickerdoodles, brownies, or tuiles, because once you start adding leaveners and eggs, you need a more detailed ratio. Or a recipe. These, Ruhlman obligingly supplies in the text of the book, but to look them up seemed like cheating.
Since there was dinner to think about, I moved on to pâte à choux (2 parts water: 1 part butter: 1 part flour: 2 parts egg) in order to make gougeres, airy cheese puffs that Ruhlman recommends you flavor with Gruyère or Parmesan. I went with aged Gouda and threw in some smoked paprika just to see what happened. (Work with ratios for even a day and you start resenting advice.) The tarted-up gougeres were a huge hit, as was the fettuccine (3 parts flour: 2 parts egg), which included both white and rye flours. I expected the experimental pasta to end up chewy and coarse, but it came out like pale gray silk. To finish the meal, I made crème anglaise (4 parts dairy: 1 part yolk: 1 part sugar) using goat’s milk and honey and froze it in the ice cream maker. Goat-honey ice cream needs a new name, but it was otherwise practically perfect.
Does this seem like an insane amount of cooking for one weekend? It was, and it was a blast. Ordinarily I find cooking enjoyable and restful; this was exhilarating and slightly exhausting. With mad-scientist fervor, I baked a few cakes (1 part egg: 1 part sugar: 1 part flour: 1 part butter), including what I would consider my crowning achievement, a green tea sponge cake. Flavored with Japanese matcha powder, this was a confection of fluffy, buttery beauty, the color of honeydew, tasting distinctly of tea. Having never before in my life “invented” a cake, I was ridiculously pleased. Yes, I know someone else has probably already invented a green tea sponge cake, but don’t rain on my parade. I’d had a breakthrough: After decades of following other people’s recipes, the anti-recipe book helped me to invent a few of my own.
Cupcake Trucks Dancing in My Dreams
Clearly, I need one of these 
However, instead of that music box style of ice cream trucks, I’d have a live DJ spinning MIA, Bitter:Sweet, and other hot beats
Just imagine, after a late drunken night at a club, this would be just the ticket! Better than IHOP!
From CNN.com
Cupcake truck hits New York
New York is about to get a new street vendor with a sweet twist. Watch out, Mister Softee; the new kid on the block is a dessert truck calling itself “New York’s first mobile cupcake shoppe.”
“This is a perfect addition to New York City’s mobile vendors,” said Lev Ekster, Cupcake Stop’s founder.
Ekster was a student six months ago, spending long hours at the New York Law School library in preparation for a legal career. But when the economic crisis dimmed the now-graduate’s prospects of securing a full-time position with a firm, he turned to another passion: entrepreneurship.
It’s an area of he knows well. As an undergraduate at Ithaca College, Ekster started a party promotion company to boost campus social life, hiring classmates to be DJs, promoters and bouncers. And while in law school, he founded a Web site where students could find law school resources.
On one of many law school study breaks at a downtown bakery, Ekster found inspiration for his next project. “He asked, ‘Why can’t a cupcake come to me?’ ” company spokeswoman Marie Assante says.
Ekster said the long lines outside the West Village’s Magnolia Bakery drove home the fact that cupcakes are in high demand in New York.
“This is a mobile city where everyone’s always on the go,” Ekster said. “I thought, ‘Let’s come to them.’ “
Along with a variety of cupcakes on different days — such as strawberry shortcake, peanut butter and jelly and one described as psychedelic tie dye — the truck will deliver gourmet coffee and other drinks.
After obtaining vendor permits and taste-testing nearly 1,000 cupcakes, Ekster bought a truck, hired a chef and set up shop.
Cupcake Stop’s inaugural event was a private party for Jill Zarin of the TV show “Real Housewives of New York” on Tuesday at Hudson Terrace.
On the drive back from the event, “people were literally chasing the truck through Times Square,” Ekster said.
The truck will be conducting a test drive to survey locations on Friday in preparation for its public debut on June 3.
Ekster is encouraging people to check Twitter for the truck’s location.
Cupcake Stop plans to donate leftover cupcakes to City Harvest, a charity that redistributes unused food from New York restaurants and vendors to the homeless.
Will You Miss Vanilla?
Happy Friday! It has been too long…
Quick Question: What would you do if vanilla disappeared?
A few weeks ago (I’ve been meaning to write but haven’t had the time) I read this fascinating article in possibly my new favorite magazine called Gastronomica. The article was called “Climate Change and the Future of Taste” written by Michele Field, so if you happen to find a back issue of the journal (the article is not posted online so far) please read it. It is incredibly well researched and detailed, but I will summarize some of the key points made in the article. Instead of the usual debate over who or what is at fault for climate change, she catalogued the foods that may suffer the most in the long run, many of which we take for granted…
(Please note, this is not to be taken as an alarmist-type post, just something to consider and discuss)
Just Desserts
Imagine a world without “cold weather crops like strawberries, wheat, apples, and oats”. Um, I can’t at the moment, particularly because that affects two of my favorite desserts: my strawberry cupcake and apple pie. Some countries have already begun to adapt to the rising costs of wheat. Peru has supplemented their bread with one-third mashed potatoes and two-thirds wheat.
Fun Fact: Did you know wheat makes up for 20% of our food calories worldwide?
As I alluded to in the title, the vanilla bean is extraordinarily sensitive to pests and soil temperatures, making it very vulnerable in the next coming years. I often feel the pinch of shelling out $5 for a few ounces of the pure extract. Ironically, we would probably miss chocolate too since about 80% of our chocolate is flavored with vanilla, and it doesn’t help that the cacao tree is super sensitive to pests. And forget about chocolate chip pancakes; maple syrup is being afflicted too.
Natural vs Nature Identical
Now instead of saying “imitation” vanilla, someone coined the term “nature identical” which really bothers me. The mere labeling of any food in that manner automatically implies the falsehood. Would you eat the “nature identical” half-cousin of a banana, the banono? Didn’t think so. Call it like it is people. We’ve been accustomed to seeing “vanillin” and other ridiculous imitative forms of names, so please buyer beware. If it ever comes to the point where natural vanilla doesn’t exist and “vanillin” is all there is, then it won’t matter anyway. I’ll be on a raw food diet.
Chain Reactions
Back to wheat for a moment. Some livestock farmers have had to increase millet (sold mostly as birdseed in the US) in their grains to bolster the loss of wheat. The taste difference is probably minimal to us for now, but it will alter the fat content of our meaty friends. I love seeing those pretty marbelized cuts of meat at the farmer’s market. I could totally have a juicy steak right now. But I won’t. I’ll finish writing. Sigh.
It’s a good thing we can find other grains to feed those animals. The point here is fairly obvious: the more fixed an animal is to its diet (or exclusively dependent on another animal), the more likely we are to lose that species. If you couldn’t adapt to another food source, you’d be out of luck. Hooray omnivores, I guess.
Other potential proteins would be sheep, goats, yaks, and wild game, especially those that survive in non-arable land and rocky, cold, mountainous climates. Geese can roam on land that can’t support vegetation and chickens have little unrecyclable waste, so it’s likely that our poultry would shift a little, but not too much.
It’s Getting Hot in Here
We think we are pretty tough on the top of the food chain, but we are linked by an undeniable truth: mammals (and many birds) begin overheating at around 107 degrees Fahrenheit. Certain plants can adapt but we haven’t been able to make any evolutionary headway in that arena just yet.
Just Keep Swimming
The rising temperature has a triple affect on seafood. The acidity rises, the oxygen dispells faster, and (obviously) it gets hot. The more active fish like salmon and tuna bear the brunt of this since no oxygen means less movement, and we all know salmon swim upstream, which takes a ton of energy. Not to mention the mating that takes place once they get upstream. TMI?
Though we may end up consuming much more freshwater fish, some restaurants and flavor companies have begun developing a potion that gives the aroma and taste of the sea to trick our senses into being satisfied with our not-from-the-sea food.
Shake It Like a Salt Shaker
Speaking of salt, it was suggested in the article that tomatoes may need to be grown in areas with higher salt content in the soil, and by cross breeding (which I will touch on later) with cress, we could have pre-salted tomatoes in stores. I personally wouldn’t mind that, but we have to be careful since there are so many with dietary restrictions that even slight increases in certain minerals and chemicals could mean eliminating that option from one’s diet.
Whining About Wine
I chuckled when it wine came up in the article, particularly because I had just seen a “Champagne only comes from Champagne, France” ad attacking the sparkling wine companies who misuse the term for their product. In the coming years, England could have an analogous climate to the current French wine country. Could we see a migration of those revered vineyards? The detriment right now is that higher temperatures cause the wines to be more alcoholic (the article got into the science of the sugars and breakdown of the grapes, but I won’t attempt it). Yes, I guess for most of us more alcoholic wine is not necessarily a bad thing…
Rice Rice Baby
Besides our gassy livestock, the article did mention the rice paddys in China as a large source of methane release, but since the percentage of the global rice supply that comes from that area is some astronomical number, I doubt anyone would be super successful in winning that battle of rice paddys vs. ozone.
Whose Genes Are These?
Now, genetic modification and hybridization have been hot button issues for some time, but I think that depending on the manner in which it is implemented, a little tweaking may be worth it in the long run. An adjacent article on baby carrots (which you know I read considering I buy carrots in 25lb monster bags) discussed the potential of infusing baby carrots with other vitamins that do not occur in their genetic make-up. Red carrots would contain lycopene (like tomatoes), of course. There was consideration of purple carrots containing nutrients similar to those found in dark chocolate. Red carrots I think I could do… not sure about purple though. I wonder if bunnies see in color? I guess the taste is what would matter.
Follow the Mushrooms
Mushrooms are incredibly intelligent. If you haven’t seen this video on how mushrooms can save the planet, please do so after you finish reading. Some mushroom species have begun migrating. You know those expensive truffle mushrooms? They have begun kissing their homes goodbye and moving to northern regions. In that same issue of Gastronomica, there is an article called “Truffle Wars” that had some interesting information on the economic side effects of the mushrooms’ decisions. You can read that entire article online.
Fun Fact: Did you know some mushroom species only existed on this planet after they were found in craters of asteroid impacts? Cue Twilight Zone music… (and no, I don’t want to hear that some of you are too young to know what the Twilight Zone is. Go back to watching Gossip Girl! Said with love.)
Stop and Smell the Sunflowers
Some good news! Those amazing photos you see of endless sunflower fields in Tuscany would probably remain. I almost exclusively use sunflower oil in my baking so that’s awesome. This also means sunflower seeds will be here, a good source of calories, though a pain to eat. And I guess sunflowers don’t particularly smell that great, so scratch that first statement, ha.
Stock (Up) Options
So what can we expect to stick around? Good old potatoes are strong, and buy into navy beans. Seaweed? Check. Mint? Check. Thyme? Check. Chickpeas? Check. Soybeans? Check.
So we will still have sushi, chewing gum, mojitos, hummus, and tofu. I can live on that diet
We could prevent the loss of some tempermental plants like basil, black pepper, and bananas if we tackle the problem early. Gradual relocation and adaptation is a possibility.
As for cupcakes? Well, I’ll figure something out. I am pretty creative.
Until Next Time…!
PS – a lot has happened with the business, but to get that info you have to visit the site.
2009 World Tour!
Happy New Year!
So I am not one to make New Year’s resolutions. Ever. And this year is no exception…
However, I am pleased to announce that Looking Glass Cupcakes will be going ON TOUR in 2009! Whoop Whoop!
Yes, we are taking this show on the road!
I imagine I’ll have groupies soon
The plan is to travel to festivals, state fairs, carnivals, craft shows, baking competitions, throwdowns, smackdowns, and any other type of gathering where the focus is on original, handmade artistry, people who love what they do, and fueling small businesses. Quaint (think county fair), metropolitan (think Atlantic Station Market), or rowdy (think Mardi Gras), I’ll be there selling yummy goodness.
I may need to think about a new approach: Deep fried cupcakes? Cupcakes on a stick? Well I already have those. Cupcakes scattered, smothered, and covered?
Hahaha. Just kidding. I don’t need gimmicks just yet…
I’ll be hitting the festival scene starting Jan, very appropriately beginning with back-to-back celebrations: MLK Day Parade and Inauguration Day. If you remember from my other blog post, I met Doc on Election Night, so it seems highly fitting that these two events would kick off the tour.
I’ll be videotaping my travels and posting them on the website (www.lookingglasscupcakes.com).
Besides cupcakes, I’ll also be selling merchandise (much like what is already offered on the website) but I may design a LGC World Tour t-shirt with the cities/festivals that I travel listed, concert-style.
I say World Tour, and I do mean it. I may stay in the southeast initially, but I anticipate traveling the country throughout the year, and eventually the world. This woman Marjorie Johnson has entered over 2500 baking competitions and has won 1000 blue ribbons! Do the math. (1000 first prize awards = tons of prize money). Nuff said!
If you can’t tell, I’m super excited.
If anyone wants to join me one weekend, let me know. Cracker, Cotton, and I would love the company!
Unitl next time…!
I’m Receiving a Culinary Award!
Ok, first… slight delay on the website launch! Wednesday, November 18th at noon!
The web service I am using is having a problem with the background on my homepage being randomized. Sometimes it’s blue, sometimes it’s purple. It should never be either of those colors. Technology glitches, sigh.
On to the exciting news!
Condensed Version: I am receiving a Culinary Award from the National African American Culinary Arts and Hospitality Association (that’s a mouthful!) on December 8th at the Auburn Avenue Research Library for my achievements with Looking Glass Cupcakes! Hooray!
Extended Version: On Election Night, I was with Camron and Jill downtown on Auburn Avenue. Jill and I had just spent the day doing “Video the Vote” when her father called and mentioned he would be headed down to Ebenezer Baptist Church on Auburn Avenue to watch the returns. (note: if you are not from Atlanta or are hazy on your black history, you may not know the significance of Auburn Avenue and Ebenezer Baptist Church, so please click the links to get yourself educated! I don’t want to go on a tangent explaining their significance ).
Anyhow, there are people EVERYWHERE. Quite literally. There is a Barackmobile with all sorts of paraphernalia plastered on it, vendors selling Obama shirts, posters, artwork, etc, and people taking photos and videotaping for history’s sake. One couple was even recording personal messages from the passers-by for their unborn son to watch when he became old enough to appreciate it. Just thinking about that makes me a little misty-eyed.
Click Here to Play: Movin On Up – Theme Song from The Jeffersons
We hear “Movin’ On Up”, the theme from The Jeffersons playing on repeat from a little shop across the street with a neon sign that proudly says “SOUL FOOD MUSEUM” and a man in a chef’s hat is clapping his hands and singing along jollily. Naturally, Camron heads in the direction of the merriment; Jill and I had to finish up our Video the Vote obligations at the polling place, so we stayed behind. About 10 minutes later, Camron shouts at me from across the street and motions for me to head over there.
The Soul Food Museum sign had piqued my curiosity (who wouldn’t be curious!?!) and Camron has a knack for engaging in fantastic conversation with people, so I knew this would be interesting. I meet Doc, who was the gentleman in the chef’s hat singing along to the music radiating from his storefront. When you speak with Doc, you are truly speaking with a spiritual soul, and it is no wonder that he has achieved so much in his lifetime. He was such a kind spirit and had devoted his endeavors to being a chef since he was 16 years old. Doc has been a celebrity chef for 35 years, and has been recognized for his amazing achievements in dozens of newspapers across the country, not to mention appearances on television shows, and will be on Oprah in 2009! Now that is credibility.
I know, I know, get back to the award thing. Ok, so Camron, my eternal cheerleader (in the super-masculine sense of the word, of course) mentions that I have a cupcake business and raves about how wonderful they are. I tell Doc about the events that I have done, and give him some info on my website where he could see photos. Doc lights up and mentions that they are having an event soon, and would love for me to participate. Thrilled, I thanked him and we exchanged information so that we could discuss it further some other time when we would be less distracted by the significant moment that was about to occur.
Today, I give Doc a call and venture down there in the rain to meet with him regarding logistics for the event. Unbeknownst to me, he had submitted my name and information to the Board of Directors for the National African American Culinary Arts and Hospitality Association for an Achievement Award. I was floored that he had even considered me for such an honor, having just met a little over a week ago. I was humbled simply by the nomination. He continued, announcing that I had been chosen for the award. Crazy! Not only that, but I would be recognized at the banquet, have my cupcakes placed in the goodie bags for the event, and have a full-page ad placed in the restaurant guide for 2009, which will be in all of the hotels and convention centers around the city. Not to mention a logo and link on the NAACHA and Soul Food Museum websites. I am still whirling from the fact that Doc, this well-connected man who is already nationally recognized (Oprah for goodness sake!) thought highly enough of me to mention me to his peers.
Camron always mentions divine timing and being guided to be in the right place just when you need to be. I used to get flustered about being places on time, and he has proven over and over that you will be where you need to be when you need to be there. Basically, there are no coincidences. It’s so simple, it’s almost hard to comprehend. Jill and I had been on a totally different side of town for most of the day, and it just-so-happened that her dad would be at Ebenezer AND there was a polling place cattycorner to the church for us to finish our business, within earshot of that classic theme music of inspiration and hope. Law of attraction in action, my friends.
Now I have to write a biography, design an ad, get my business cards in order, clean up my logo, really launch the website, and make 200 cupcakes for the event (not to mention decide what flavor)…
I should get started
Until Next Time!
Website Launch on Friday, Nov 14th!
So it has been MONTHS since I’ve posted, but guess who’s baaaaack!
As the title of this post so obviously states, www.lookingglasscupcakes.com will be re-lauching on Friday!!
The current website will be disappearing for a slick, new 2.0 upgraded version that I have been tirelessly working on! It will be re-directing on Friday, so keep a mental countdown and I can’t wait for you to check it out! Until Friday…!
Quick Update
My faithfuls! I’m sure you missed me, I’ve been super busy with planning an event with some friends (click here to find out more) but I promise I will be able to write more steadily now. Hooray! Just a quick update on a few things:
- meeting with the bistro went well
- i tried out a new shortcake recipe which was awesome
- i sold some cupcakes over the weekend
- i have new photos
- i joined epicurious.com
Just a heads up, the next detailed post will be about the different cake types, and the effect that each ingredient has in the chemical reactions of cake baking (this may actually have to be split into 2 posts). This will give a good framework for understanding how to modify recipes with substitutions and/or how omitting even the slightest teaspoon of certain ingredients can prove DISASTEROUS!
Talk to you soon!
The Sticky Truth
A quick business update: I am receiving quite the helping hand from a new friend, AJ, who is going to put me in touch with some people who could potentially assist greatly in launching this whole game To be continued very soon…!
So I tried out two new recipes this weekend: a modified red velvet cupcake with a meringue type icing and a maple cupcake with a blueberry glaze or a blueberry crème. I had fairly opposite results and a whole host of lessons (including some of my very own food photography). The red velvet was for a July 4th BBQ, while the maple-blueberry combo was for an organizational meeting for a festival in August. (I will fill you in on the festival details soon). For now, let’s see what I learned this weekend:
lesson 1 – purple ≠ red
The modified red velvet ended up being too dry and (by my own fault) not red at all. See, I accidentally mixed up the tops on my food coloring bottles and dropped purple into the mix, then I tried to solve it by dropping more red into the batter, which turned it an unnatural magenta. Worse yet, since you add the dry ingredients at the end, and there is cocoa powder in the recipe, it became brick red. A dirty, dusty, muddy brick red. Ugh. Not one to waste any opportunity to photograph, I will discuss the trick in shooting this cupcake in the visual section
lesson 2 – mini cupcakes + dark pan = less cooking time (and no TV)
So, most avid bakers will tell you that even though an oven will say 350o, it’s not necessarily true, especially with older ovens like the one in my apartment. My dial knob isn’t the most accurate in the first place and tends to heat unevenly, so I try to remember to turn it just under the desired temperature. Dismissing that for a moment, it should also be fairly obvious that if the cupcakes are smaller and less in quantity, they will take less time to bake. I’ve made mini-cupcakes before and noticed that you have to cut down baking time up to 10 minutes sometimes. Always set the timer for half of the full baking time to allow you to check and adjust as necessary. Last point to keep in mind, the darker the baking pan, the quicker it will retain heat, and the less baking time you will need. Most pans are a medium colored silver gray, but my mini pan happens to be a much darker shade. Unfortunately, all of this information that I already knew happily flew out the window while I baked on Friday. I guess I was distracted by the Family Guy movie that I left playing (you know the part where Quagmire decides to go on his cross “country” tour, country without an “o” in it… note to self, no more TV while baking, only music). The poor minis that came out of the oven were fitting considering they were already that ugly shade of redbrick: they were heavy, rock hard, potentially tooth-chipping, and completely inedible. Luckily, since I discouraged myself from buying an additional mini-cupcake pan while I was at the store earlier that day, I had only used half of the batter, and I was able to try again…
lesson 3 – meringue icing = delightful marshmallowy goo…until it dries
Ok, so everyone knows meringues are those light and crispy sugar-and-egg-white French cookie confections, right? I was intrigued by this idea of meringue icing because obviously I only know meringue as this hard but delicate dessert. It turns out, in its pre-baked state, meringue begins as something light and fluffy, then transforms into something much more viscous. Madiha, a new friend that I met at the party, compared the consistency it to “that Jet-Puffed marshmallow crème that comes in the jar.” The challenge was to keep the meringue at a constant temperature so that it didn’t get to that crispy state, and it was QUITE difficult considering these Georgia summers. Seriously, dried meringue could be used as an alternative for hot wax…just reference the smooth patch on my arm where a tiny bit of meringue fell. The partygoers seemed to enjoy the icing because it was different, not the standard mouthful of buttercream or cream cheese, so I had moderate success. I will definitely play around with it more to see what types of flavors I can infuse into it so that it can have more dimension and really wow a crowd.
lesson 4 – always be inspired by donuts
The maple cupcake for Sunday’s meeting was quite possibly the best cake I have made to-date. It was light and soft, but still had significant body to it. Earlier, I had a craving for french toast, which inspired the idea for that cupcake in particular. I went up to my aunt’s house for a little while and she happened to have just picked some home-grown blueberries. The idea instantly came to me: try a donut-style blueberry glaze. The reasoning was two-fold: first, it seemed to be an obvious choice since I was going with the whole breakfast theme. Secondly, as I mentioned before, I have recently encountered many people recently who don’t particularly care for traditional icing. There are a lot of vegan/vegetarian/ health-conscious people involved in with the block party, and I have been experimenting with alternatives to eggs, dairy, animal products, etc. Though these cupcakes were not vegan, most of my taste-testers were extremely receptive to both the glaze and crème; the main suggestion was to add more blueberries (which is valid since I only had about a handful to work with). They really liked the idea of a cupcake/donut fusion so there is much more to be explored in that realm. I was told by one attendee that she liked the creme much more than the glaze, but this may be attributed to her dislike of blueberry glaze donuts (I appreciate the feedback, Kristen!).
All in all this was a pretty rockin’ weekend. I appreciate all of you who tasted for me this weekend, and thank you for your opinions! I am taking them to heart. If I haven’t seen you in a while, hit me up so you can get some cupcakes in your life!
Until next time…!
Day 1: What a Debut!
So my friend Laura works at a clothing boutique called 1*five*0 that also features local artists and musical acts on a regular basis. Recently, I have been helping out behind the bar and watching the store during these events. Tonight happened to be both a concert for an artist, Emily Kate Boyd (who was great) as well as the going away party for a radio personality, our own Leslie Fram from 99x. I had previously brought cupcakes as sweet little surprises to the store for the staff, so I made some for this occasion as well. I printed out several different versions of business cards (because I am sometimes an indecisive Libra) and hurried over to the event, cupcakes safely in my Target snapware carrying case Read the rest of this entry »
