Cupcake Chemistry
Understanding the Basics of Baking, Decorating, and Food PhotographyArchive for random thoughts
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.
