I'm finally starting to understand people who read food blogs. I've always been of the opinion that good food is nice, and good recipes are nice, and it's nice that someone puts those recipes online, but we don't really need to hear the details. But I've been baking a lot lately, and these last three days I've actually started truly experimenting, and suddenly I'm fascinated by what works and what doesn't.
While I was at the store on Monday night, I had a brilliant idea that I would make coconut cupcakes for Valentine's Day and bring them to work. I bought the ingredients I thought I would need, imagining light, fluffy white cupcakes.
Unfortunately, I bought the wrong ingredients. That, and all the recipes for light, fluffy white cupcakes seemed to involve beating egg whites with a mixer on high speed. The only mixer I have is a wooden spoon and some gimpy arms, a combination that lacks some of the effectiveness, I think. (It's annoying how the recipes all assume the modern conveniences. What on earth did people do before they had mixers? Maybe they just developed arm muscles. Maybe they had non-ruined nerves. Stupid law school.) I abandoned my idea of light and fluffy in favor of richer and denser, and easier to make by hand with ingredients already in my house.
I dug out the golden cake recipe that I used to bake on a coalpot in Sudan, and added coconut and nutmeg in addition to vanilla (I don't know, I read somewhere a recipe that involved coconut and nutmeg). And then I added the same to buttercream frosting and I baked coconut to sprinkle on top.
They were some pretty delicious cupcakes, although somehow they ended up more like a neon pink than the light pink I was imagining. Someone was a little free with the food coloring. Good thing I'm not a perfectionist or anything.
OR ANYTHING.
(I'm actually not really a perfectionist. Or Type A enough to be a lawyer. I think I'm going to ditch law and open a coffee shop somewhere in Africa, and bake delicious things and make delicious espresso. The evil Citibank that now calls me at 5:28 am cannot get to me if I am in Africa. Jerks.)
While I was at the store on Monday night, I had a brilliant idea that I would make coconut cupcakes for Valentine's Day and bring them to work. I bought the ingredients I thought I would need, imagining light, fluffy white cupcakes.
Unfortunately, I bought the wrong ingredients. That, and all the recipes for light, fluffy white cupcakes seemed to involve beating egg whites with a mixer on high speed. The only mixer I have is a wooden spoon and some gimpy arms, a combination that lacks some of the effectiveness, I think. (It's annoying how the recipes all assume the modern conveniences. What on earth did people do before they had mixers? Maybe they just developed arm muscles. Maybe they had non-ruined nerves. Stupid law school.) I abandoned my idea of light and fluffy in favor of richer and denser, and easier to make by hand with ingredients already in my house.
I dug out the golden cake recipe that I used to bake on a coalpot in Sudan, and added coconut and nutmeg in addition to vanilla (I don't know, I read somewhere a recipe that involved coconut and nutmeg). And then I added the same to buttercream frosting and I baked coconut to sprinkle on top.
They were some pretty delicious cupcakes, although somehow they ended up more like a neon pink than the light pink I was imagining. Someone was a little free with the food coloring. Good thing I'm not a perfectionist or anything.
OR ANYTHING.
(I'm actually not really a perfectionist. Or Type A enough to be a lawyer. I think I'm going to ditch law and open a coffee shop somewhere in Africa, and bake delicious things and make delicious espresso. The evil Citibank that now calls me at 5:28 am cannot get to me if I am in Africa. Jerks.)
No comments:
Post a Comment