Third Comes Love

Today was Cream & Sugar's first annual (or maybe biannual) cupcake decorating contest, co-hosted by Penn and Drexel, which my roommate and I entered. Getting messy with frosting and whatnot sounded like a perfect way to spend our Saturday afternoon. Luckily, all the materials were provided, and all we had to do was use them to make fun cupcake creations.

Jumping to the awesome part, my roommate and I won third place! ...out of six teams, but hey, placing is placing. We won a prize of forty dollars, making for a net profit of a whopping seven dollars and fifty cents each, after subtracting the twenty-five dollar entrance fee. I think I'll go splurge that on lunch tomorrow. Okay, maybe it's not a huge prize, but I'm glad we didn't incur any losses. Also, more importantly, the contest was a lot of fun. I'm too lazy to ever spend much time on making a pretty cupcake design on my own, so actually having a dedicated amount of time to decorating one cupcake was a nice change of pace. I got to gorge on candy and frosting throughout the entire process, and later eat the cupcake I decorated. In the end, I came out with $7.50, candy, and a free cupcake. Oh, and a coupon for free ice cream for even competing. Ah, and being immortalized as third place winner of Cream & Sugar's first regular cupcake decorating contest. Not bad, not bad.

I'm gonna say I was pretty freaked out when the competition started. People started whipping out their crazy materials--since you were allowed to bring your own stuff and use it in addition to the provided supplies--and doing crazy things. I felt vastly under-prepared. But when I started doing my cupcake, I got pretty caught up in the decorating and stopped paying attention to the people around me. I guess psyching yourself out by looking at the competition really doesn't help you. If you get busy and do your thing, everything works out...kind of. I can sort of understand how people feel in those competitive cooking shows. You really get pressed for time, and you have no time to waste dawdling around or checking out your competition.

My cupcake

Since Penn's campus is home to a version of Robert Indiana's LOVE sculpture--and countless squirrels--that became the theme of my cupcake. It's a chocolate cupcake with vanilla buttercream frosting. The grass was made with chopped up pieces of these long, skinny, green, sugar-coated candy ropes and the green sprinkles that I spent way too long plucking out of a bowl of multi-colored sprinkles. I wish I just had green sprinkles from the start so that I could quickly coat the entire cupcake. I ran out of time, which explains why the grass looks so sparse. I could have said that the brown cupcake represents the dirt below the grass, just barely peeking from beneath the thawing snow, but that's way too huge of a lie. The sculpture part is cut-up Swedish Fish candies. Luckily, Swedish Fish are wonderfully sticky and chewy on the inside, so all I had to do was place the pieces next to each other, and they would stay together perfectly. I did have some issues with gravity though, which is apparent in the sad and deformed E. It started out fine, but I guess it couldn't handle the weight of the O. Oh, speaking of Os, only after the entire contest was over and I walked out of the building and saw the sculpture did I realize that my O was facing the wrong direction. During the entire candy sculpture assembling process, I kept thinking that something was off, but I couldn't quite place what. I guess I'll know for future reference. The squirrel was an almond with Tootsie Roll tail and head. I liked the cupcake, but I wish I had more time to complete it. If I had more than half an hour, I would have completely covered the grass, and maybe added some bushes or something like that.

Between the two of us, we were only allowed to submit one cupcake, so my LOVE cupcake got entered, and my roommate's cupcake got eaten right away. Hers was super cute though, and it deserves some attention. Now that I think about it, and see it again, I kind of wonder why we didn't submit hers.

Beach themed

The base is a vanilla cupcake with vanilla buttercream frosting. The palm tree trunks are sculpted from Tootsie Rolls. The sand is made from the shavings of almond skins, and those almonds were used as the coconuts for the trees. The leaves were made from cut-up army men gummy candies, which tasted absolutely horrible, but at least they served their purpose. The surf boards are Swedish Fish, and chocolate sprinkles spell out "SURF ^." She commented that it was supposed to be surf's up, but there wasn't enough time for the S at the end, so she settled with somewhat bad grammar.

The second place team had an Alice in Wonderland-themed cupcake. It was really happy and cute. Their piping was pretty sweet, and it made me feel like one of these days, I should really learn how to pipe frosting. The first place team had a dinosaur-themed cupcake. I have one word: awesome. And cool, so I guess that's two words. When they were explaining their theme, they mentioned that they're both taking a paleontology class, and one of the girls had a nightmare about a triceratops chasing her. Thus, the cupcake idea was born. I'm a little appalled at how school can affect people so much that they have nightmares about it. I guess everyone's working hard. While these cupcakes were cute, I'm going to shamelessly promote my own cupcake and say that at least it was made entirely with the available materials. The other teams brought their own stuff to decorate with, such as marzipan for the dinosaur, which was allowed, but still.

The other three cupcakes were a burger theme, a cup of coke theme, and a mud theme. I guess the scoring was pretty fair. The burger is pretty well-done, but that idea has been done so many times. Even within the same competition, another team had a burger cupcake. That team chose to enter the coke cup instead. As for the coke, it was cute, but since the scoring was based on design, creative use of materials, and desire to actually eat the cupcake, maybe it lost out in creative use of materials. Their design was cute, but they brought their own stuff--marshmallow fluff with powdered sugar and food coloring--and they didn't execute their cupcake as well as the dinosaur team, who also used entirely their own materials. It is quite adorable though. The person with the mud cupcake gets brownie points because she said she just really likes chocolate and wanted to enter the most chocolate-y cupcake she could. I approve.

All in all, this was a really fun experience. I got my sugar intake for the day, or maybe next couple days, and I'm inspired to make more cute little baked things. I also got to question the owner of the bakery about how to make a good consistency frosting, so I learned something today as well. Competitive food-related things are fun, but I think I prefer to spend time lovingly making things in the comfort of my own kitchen. However, this doesn't mean that I won't think about entering some more competitions if they crop up in the future.

Party in the Kitchen

I felt like making cupcakes today. Since yellow cake is the base of a lot of cupcakes, I figured I'd begin my search for a good yellow cake recipe. The last time I tried a yellow cake, it came out really dense, so I was on the hunt for a lighter, fluffier recipe. Handy dandy Google pointed me to this one-bowl yellow cake recipe, which looked pretty moist, although it's sometimes hard to tell with pictures. It also had the benefit of being prepared in, as the name says, one bowl. I do love simplicity. Furthermore, its ingredient list was pretty basic, calling only for things that I already had on hand. I was sold.

Yellow cake is kind of boring though. It just seemed like such a plain thing, so I wanted to spice it up a little. Having never made confetti cake before, I didn't want to be that girl who's never made confetti cake, so I decided that color would be my chosen form of spicing up. Also, since the happy flecks of color don't interfere too much with the taste and consistency of a cake, I'd still be able to see if this recipe would be right for me.

Did you know that the specks of color in confetti cake are created by sprinkles mixed into the batter? I didn't. I only found that out yesterday when I looked up confetti cake on a whim. Whenever I ate a confetti cupcake that a friend or classmate brought to school, I never really thought about where the color came from. Now I know.

I made a slight adjustment to the original recipe. It calls for 1 and 1/4 cups of sugar, but since sprinkles are basically sugar, I substituted a quarter cup of sprinkles for that quarter cup of sugar. In the end, the cupcakes were still too sweet for my liking, so next time around, I'm going to try cutting some sugar. Aside from that, the cake was pretty good. It was airy and soft. I think it could be a tad more moist, so I think I'll play around with that next time as well, but it's no big deal. I may just be doing the excessively picky thing.

This cake's color is quite lovely. It's a nice, creamy, mellow yellow, which I much prefer to the blaring sunshine yellow of some other cakes.

Ingredients: Makes about 20 cupcakes

2 cups all purpose flour, sifted

1 cup sugar

1 Tbsp. baking powder

1 tsp. salt

1/2 cup (1 stick) butter, softened

1 cup milk

1 tsp. vanilla extract

2 eggs

1/4 cup sprinkles

Directions: Preheat your oven to 350 F. Sift the flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt into a large mixing bowl. I don't know how essential sifting is, but in something delicate like cake, I'd imaging you want all the lumps out. I'm really not sure how much some lumps affect the cake consistency or if they do at all, and usually when I sift, I don't find any particularly large lumps. But I sift anyway because it's kind of fun.

I actually got a pretty substantial chunk of sugar

Add the butter into the bowl and whisk it until it mixes with the dry ingredients and turns kind of crumbly. I hate whisking butter...it gets all stuck inside the whisk, but by the end of the process, it should be in small enough pieces to not get stuck. Add the milk and vanilla extract and continue whisking/mixing for another minute or two. Add the eggs and then whisk yet another minute or two. Alternatively, this whole thing can be done with an electric mixer, the way it's described on the original recipe, but I don't have one. Finally, stir in the sprinkles.

Color!

Spoon the batter into the wells of a lined (or unlined) muffin tin, filling them about 2/3 of the way. Normally I don't line my muffins or cupcakes with liners because I think they're kind of a waste, but I felt like making super cupcake-looking cupcakes, so I used liners this time. Sometimes you have to grease the liners because they'll cling to your cupcakes and take off an obscene amount of cake when you try to remove them, but I found that they didn't stick at all with this recipe--no greasing necessary. I'm not sure if this is the case without the liners, and I'd grease the pan just to be safe.

Something like 2/3 full

Every so often, I say to myself, "Wow, I haven't made cupcakes or muffins in a while. I should make some." And then after I start making them, I remember why. I hate spooning batter into wells. It's such a messy and/or time-consuming process. I talked to my mom yesterday, who was watching a show on cupcakes, and she said the bakers used ice cream scoops to put the batter into the wells. Maybe I should invest in an ice cream scoop, which might also help regulate the size of my cupcakes. They're always all sorts of different sizes because I can't seem to spoon the same amount into each well.

Bake cupcakes for 15 minutes, give or take, until a toothpick inserted into a test cupcake comes out clean. Because I don't have toothpicks, I use an uncoated wooden chopstick, which leaves a really unsightly hole in whatever I bake, but at least I'm not constantly throwing out those sharp little spears of wood. Luckily, cupcakes have frosting to cover up the hole. After removing from the oven, let the pan cool for about five minutes, and then relocate the cupcakes to a cooling rack. I've been living without a cooling rack for a while, and usually I just leave whatever I'm cooling on the vent of the (off) heater or on the racks of the (off) stove top. I discovered today that a sushi roller on top of a large bowl and a basket steamer make for really good substitute cooling racks. A removed oven rack apparently works for some people as well, but the gratings are too large in mine, and stuff just falls through instead of sitting on top of it. As you'll notice, my life in college is very much about living without certain kitchen-y, and other, things. (I say that, yet I randomly have some really specialized things, like a candy thermometer...and immersion blender.)

My fantastic cooling rig

After the cupcakes are completely cool, frost with whatever frosting you like. I used the cream cheese frosting provided with the cake recipe, with a tad extra sugar to smooth out the tang of the cream cheese. If you like your frosting quite sweet, you should probably add even more sugar.

Ingredients: Makes frosting for about 20 cupcakes, unless you like an extremely generous amount of frosting or barely any at all, in which case...adjust for your taste.

8 oz cream cheese, room temperature

1/2 cup (1 stick) butter, room temperature

1-1/2 cup powdered sugar

Directions: Using a spatula, wooden spoon, or other similar device, smash cream cheese and butter into a smooth paste. Switch to a whisk and add powdered sugar very gradually, whisking in between each addition. Seriously, gradually. I added the sugar about a tablespoon at a time. While it's a really slow process, it helps your frosting come out smooth rather than clumpy. If you're using an electric mixer, lucky you--you probably can add the sugar in larger quantities.

Frost with whatever you want to frost. I was thinking about practicing my nonexistent piping abilities, but after thinking about it, cleaning up the piping bag seemed like too much work. I opted to frost with a knife instead, which worked out fine since I actually prefer the way hand-frosted cupcakes look. I think the next kitchen tool on my list is a flexible cake spatula. I use my mom's pharmaceutical something spatula at home, which is an excellent frosting tool, but it's at home, and I think it belongs there. Alas, I guess I must get my own. Or maybe not since I don't often make cakes or cupcakes. Then again, that could change in the near future.

I wish I owned more than one plate

Rollin 'weed

Perhaps Spam is just slightly unconventional...

Seaweed, to be precise. For lunch today, I decided that I wanted kimbap, which is a Korean lunch-y food that somewhat resembles Japanese sushi rolls. I say somewhat resembles because kimbap has more veggies and no raw fish. In Korean, "kim" means seaweed and "bap" means rice, so the direct translation of the word is seaweed-rice. While this is not the most creative name, it is an apt description.

Whenever I come across a non-Asian person who has never come into contact with seaweed, he or she makes a strange face at the thought of eating it. No, seaweed is not that rubbery slippery stuff at the beach that always washes onto shore and is infested with thousands of flies--that would be kelp. It's a delicious, crispy, salty, pleasurable sheet of green goodness that is cut up in roughly 2x3-inch rectangles, eaten as a pseudo side dish, and enhances pretty much any meal. At least the Korean kind is. There's also sushi seaweed, which is sturdier, more flexible, and unseasoned, and it's used for, well, sushi. It's also used for kimbap, actually.

Kimbap is such a good packed food, and I have many fond memories of it from childhood. My parents and I would go to the Korean market and pick up a couple packages for our nighttime picnics at the Hollywood bowl, ready to face the open air and enjoy an outdoor classical music concert, concluding with brilliant fireworks. Let's ignore the fact that I ate all my kimbap in the first half hour and then proceeded to fall asleep, missing everything that happened. Anyway, those packages of two rolls, tightly saran-wrapped into a styrofoam tray, accompanied by three bright-yellow semicircles of pickled radish, were a sight to behold.

Nostalgic and hungry, I felt like reproducing them. This turned out to be way more work than I expected. Who knew that so much went into such seemingly simple things? They weren't particularly difficult to make, but there were many steps involved. Usually they're made with beef, but due to my immediate lack of beef, I decided to go with my favorite canned alternative: Spam. I know many people are grossed out by canned mystery meat, but I love it. I have no truly persuasive argument in favor of it, and even I am puzzled when I read the first item on the ingredient list, "pork with ham." However, if my taste buds like it, which they do, I will eat it. There are many items that I will step down from my pedestal of healthiness and food-snobbery for, and Spam is one of them. The rest of my ingredients were spinach, carrots, eggs, and pickled radish (also known as danmooji). All of the ingredients, minus the spinach, had to be sliced into skinny, long strips so that they could be rolled up.

I am always amazed by how dirty spinach is. I actually pulled off chunks of dirt and mud from my spinach leaves before soaking them in water, to remove more dirt, and then washing them liberally, to remove even more dirt. When it comes to spinach, I'm not worried so much about the dirtiness as about the gritty texture that dirt creates. I am very picky about texture. Cleanliness? That's a very different story.

Soaking spinach as I julienne carrots

I blanched the spinach in boiling water for about a minute and then ran it under cold water for a bit to cool it. "A bit" is clearly not long enough because the spinach was still quite hot enough to feel hot when I tried to grab it. I let it run under the water for some more time. As I let it drain, I cooked the eggs and then cut them, and then I grilled my already-cut Spam. Because I'm lazy, I bought the radish precut. Assembly time!

Assembled and ready to go

The seaweed goes down on the bamboo sushi roller--yes, this is a necessary piece of equipment--and then the rice goes on the seaweed. Spreading the rice on the seaweed can be tricky. If you're not careful, you can rip a hole in your seaweed. Using a nonstick rice paddle really helps, but the next best thing is a wet spoon or spatula or something. I actually didn't have sushi seaweed, so I ended up using the flaky Korean kind, which is delicious, but rather fragile. I managed, amazingly, to not tear a gaping hole this time.

I have a tendency to massively overstuff my kimbap. I had to make an effort not to. In my opinion, more is generally better, but in the case of kimbap, more means a roll that doesn't close and then falls apart while you attempt to slice it. Even without jamming way too much stuff in there, the rolling process was still kind of tough because of the lack of sushi seaweed. As a result, my kimbap was slightly loose because I couldn't apply as much squeezing force while rolling, for fear of destroying the base. I know what to put on my grocery list for next time.

My kimbap came out slightly ghetto-looking, but not as bad as it could have been. I had plenty of leftover ingredients, so those went into the fridge, and I'll have another try at making a prettier roll for my lunch tomorrow. Luckily, since the ingredients are prepared, tomorrow's lunch-making process will be much quicker. I'm gonna have to adjust something though because today's kimbap was rather bland. I think there needs to be some sesame oil somewhere, and possibly something else. Regardless, it was still good enough to hit the spot, and now I am sufficiently reminded of falling asleep amongst hundreds of people as an orchestra's instruments lull me to sleep.

Rolled and sliced

Macaronster

Like many, many people in this world, I have a slight obsession with macarons. They are wonderfully delicious cookies with an indescribable texture. They come in pretty much every flavor imaginable and in every color you can think of. And they sort of resemble little hamburgers. I would put up a picture of them, but I am going to be really stubborn about only posting pictures that have come from my own camera, so instead I shall refer any readers to this absolutely gorgeous blog that shows and tells you everything you want to know about macarons. After falling in love with Pierre Herme macarons when I was in Paris, I returned to the states in search of a place that could produce a similar delight. I suffered two problems, the first of which being that there were scarcely any places that carried these lovely creatures, and the second of which being that of the places that did have them, all were sub-par. Maybe sub-par is a little harsh since they were still kind of good, but they didn't carry the full force of texture and taste that comes with the title macaron.

Being the maniacal kitchen person that I am, I decided that since no one else could make them to my liking, I would. Long story short, I failed. Despite being cute, often pastel-colored, little things, they are horrible monsters that drive you to tears. The first time I tried making them was at home a couple years ago. They tasted alright, but they completely lacked the frilly little foot that is essential to macarons. The next few times were earlier this year, in my dorm, and those were complete busts. They kept coming out crunchy, lopsided, and excessively brown. After those failed tries, I, absolutely discouraged, placed my almonds in the back of my shelf and forgot about them.

Last week, I got the hankering for a macaron again, and after some troubleshooting, I learned that my thin, warped cookie sheet was the problem. With renewed vigor, I marched to the store to buy a heavy-duty baking pan. I left with a sturdy, double layer insulated baking sheet and a reusable nonstick baking sheet liner (since using up so much parchment paper hurts my conscience). That night, with all my ingredients ready to go, I began. Sadly, I did not even get to the part where I tested out my new baking sheet. I couldn't even get my egg whites to form a nice stiff meringue. They just became this thick...goo. I was done.

I put my macaron ingredients away and, rather than throwing away my pathetic egg white mess, I dumped random other things into them to make an impromptu chocolate cake-bread of sorts. Since macarons call for only egg whites, I also made lemon curd with the remaining yolks because I hate wasting anything. With a burning passion. The lemon curd is quite good with morning toast. At least I got something out of my macaron failure.

Chocolate loaf and lemon curd

The chocolate loaf was actually kind of not good at all, but what can you expect from bread bred from anger and frustration. (Ha, bred/bread, get it?) My roommate and I ate it anyway. The lemon curd recipe came from here, but I only used the juice of half a lime since the other half went into my banana bread. Oh speaking of that banana bread, only after going to the post office, finding it closed, and asking my roommate why it was closed, did I realize today was President's Day. Curses, banana goodness delayed a day.

On a side note, buying a lemon from the market nearly killed me. At home, I have a prolific lemon tree, and I always took it for granted that lemons were free. Being on the other side of the country, many miles away from my backyard, I realized that if I wanted a lemon, I would have to go to the store and shell out sixty-seven cents for it. This may not be a lot, but it was a huge blow to someone who has not purchased a lemon in a decade. Okay, this could be a gross exaggeration since there aren't always lemons on my tree all year round, but at least at home, it was my mother doing the purchasing, not me.

Anyway, the moral of the story is that macarons are vicious. After nursing my wounded ego back to health, I'll be making another attempt at them. And then another. And then another. One of these days, I swear I'll get it. Macarons, THIS ISN'T THE LAST OF ME!

Beginning this Blog with Birthday Banana Bread

I recently realized that food is one of the most important aspects of my life. Since we, as humans, obtain all of our energy through this thing called food, the conclusion that food is important is somewhat obvious. Love of food, however, goes beyond just the ingestion of it. Food comes in so many different forms, and the different combinations of taste and texture make eating such a pleasant experience. Since so much of my time is spent either thinking about eating, making something to eat, or actually eating, I figured I would start seriously documenting my thoughts about all things food, as well as the various adventures I experience while trying to satiate my hunger. I love food, I love rambling about my life, and recently I'm really starting to love photography, so what better way to combine them all than by adding yet another food blog to the world's endless warehouse. Despite having an extremely average writing ability, I also really love literary devices and wordplay, so please bear with me as I pretend that I'm clever and attempt to force puns and whatnot onto unwilling audiences. With that said, here I begin.

Today is my dear friend's birthday, and for practicality's sake, I decided to send her a quick bread instead of a cake because there's less of a chance for it to get destroyed in the mail. With no decorations or embellishments, there's nothing to get messed up as it's tossed around by those friendly people whose driver's seats are on the right side of their vehicle. Also, it tends to stay moist and delicious for longer. This was baked Friday night, sent Saturday morning via USPS priority mail, and should arrive Monday morning. Yes, it'll be a day late, but that's life.

Banana bread ranks pretty high on my list of favorite loaves. Bananas are pretty powerful creatures, and when put together with other things, such as in smoothies, they tend to overwhelm and make everything taste like banana. Banana bread is great because it's dedicated to that one ingredient, and it's supposed to taste very much like banana. It's also pretty hard to mess up. Actually, quick breads in general are pretty hard to ruin. You basically pour everything into that rectangular cavity and jam it in the oven for a while. This is why my loaf pan and I are best friends.

I am pretty fond of this recipe. I think the lime juice and rind balance out the sweetness of the banana, which can be pretty dangerous because I can keep eating slice after slice. Fortunately, this loaf is going to my friend, so I will delay my transformation into a whale for a little while longer.

Aww, ingredients look so happy together

Ingredients:

2 Tbsp. butter, softened

2 Tbsp. cream cheese, softened

3/4 cup granulated sugar

1 large egg

2 cups all purpose flour

2 tsp. baking powder

1/2 tsp. baking soda

1/8 tsp. salt

1 cup mashed bananas

1/2 cup milk

1/tsp. grated lime rind

2 tsp. lime juice

1 tsp. vanilla extract

1/2 cup chopped pecans

Directions: Preheat oven to 375 F and grease a 9x5 loaf pan. In a large mixing bowl, cream butter, sugar, and cream cheese. I actually didn't have cream cheese, so I used yogurt instead. I don't know if that affected the taste or texture much since I didn't get to try it, but I guess I'll have to ask my friend what she thinks. Add in the egg and mix until incorporated.

In another bowl, mix flour, baking soda, and salt. Set aside.

In yet another bowl, mash the bananas with a fork until you get a fairly smooth paste. It should somewhat resemble slightly lumpy oatmeal. Add in the milk, lime rind, lime juice, and vanilla extract and mix.

Returning to your sugar-butter mixture, add a bit of the flour mixture and a bit of the banana mixture, and mix until smooth. Add more of the flour mixture, the rest of the banana mixture, and mix until smooth. Mix in the rest of the banana mixture. I'm not really sure why you're supposed to alternate the mixtures, but hey, that's what the recipe card says, so I follow the instructions. My only hypothesis is that alternating lets the acidic lime juice and basic baking soda react at a gradual pace, but who knows. One of these days I'll try just dumping everything in at once and mixing to see if it makes a difference. If doing so has no effect on the bread, I will be happy since it could save just a tad bit of effort, and I am kind of lazy.

Lastly, stir in the pecans and then pour the batter into your loaf pan. Bake for 50-60 minutes, depending on your oven. In my rather underpowered dorm room oven, it takes 60 minutes. In my excessively zealous home kitchen oven, it takes more like 45 minutes. Basically just keep an eye on it when it's been in the oven for around that amount of time. Take out the bread when time's up, let it cool in the pan for 10 minutes, and then relocate it to a cooling rack or similar device. And then devour it. I personally prefer my quick breads with an even consistency rather than a crunchy crust, so I like to eat my banana bread on the next day, after it's been sitting in a covered container for a while. But I never say no to a slice from a warm, freshly baked banana bread.

Fresh from the oven!

I hope this particular loaf makes it safely through the mail.