So you don't have to: Burger King Bonanza

Stuffin my face.

It's the moment you've all been waiting for. Have those Burger King chips been sitting in your pantry, as you've been (im)patiently waiting for me to give you the go ahead? Well wait no more, I can safely tell you.....stay away. stay far, far away. Let's dive in!
The first time I encountered the chips, whose flavor was simply "Flame Broiled" was at a Blockbuster in March. Immediately intrigued, I purchased the chips, along with whichever LOST disc I was up to at the time. I bought them for sake of writing, for my loyal readers. I was going to review the chips and impart my criticism to the masses. Then I chickened out. They stayed in my pantry until they expired. and considering how many preservatives are in these, they must have lived at Blockbuster, with no one to claim them, for a very long time.
But I was determined,so I bought some more, and was gifted a bag of the Burger King Onion Ring chips, for my birthday.Oh, it was on.
LET THE GREAT EXPERIMENT BEGIN!
Have it your way.

There's no good way to have these.

Not dead yet!

Sunny Robot Approved!

Now, for part 2, the "onion rings"

Nuff said.
My analysis is this: The flame broiled chips were tolerable because, well most importantly, I have really low standards for junk food. I'll eat allllmost anything. It had the texture of of a Frito, and tasted lightly of BBQ sauce and a splash of pepper, so i could have easily eaten more, if not all. But i would have felt terrible about it. Perhaps it's the Monosodium Glutamate talking. (MSG!)
The onion rings on the other hand, I couldn't even deal with. Let me just get this off my chest....I don't like Funyons!! Phew, that feels good.Anyway, these tasted like funyons that had been heavily garlic-ed. So.....gross.

To help you understand how much i like junk food, and how bad these onion rings were, when I asked Jamie if he would like some, he answered promptly: "If you can't eat them, nobody should."

Boo Math.

"You take the good, you take the bad,
you take them both and there you have
The Facts of Life, the Facts of Life."
I've never seen the Facts of life. I was more of a Mary Tyler Moore kinda gal. however, this song plays loudly in my head when i think about what happened to my cupcakes last night.
Some background: Brother bear, Sister Bear and baby Bear or coming over for dinner tonight. As the sole resident of my apartment, I don't cook often, and almost never for others. So i was excited to plan a menu. Also, as a pastry student, I don't "cook" in general, so i wasn't looking for anything ambitious for dinner. For dessert on the other hand, well, you know me. I had found this wonderful recipe for Chocolate Graham Cracker cupcakes with Marshmallow frosting. perfect!
i got home and took inventory for a shopping list. didn't need bittersweet chocolate, I had unsweetened! (yes. i didn't notice that minor detail til the bitter end. bah dum chiiing!) the main problem was this recipe was for 24 cupcakes, which is just absurd. I am in no position to eat leftover cupcakes, but i'll be damned if i let them go to waste! So i cut the recipe in half. which would have been easy as pie if the measurements were weighed, but they weren't. So 1 3/4 cup becomes .875 a cup, and COME ON what does that mean?!
So I gambled and guessed and closed my eyes and figured it couldn't come out too bad right? baking is a science, my friends. no dashes, pinches, handfuls. Now I know first hand.
The batter was VERY soupy, there was clearly a lack of starches to hold the thing together. if you can put cupcake batter in the tins with a ladel, you're doing it wrong. but i thought, maaaaaybe it will all come together at the end.

It looked alright going in, there was a glimmer of hope. I placed them very carefully in the oven, careful not to spill any over the sides (!). After 10 minutes I was supposed to turn them, and in this time I was getting ready the Marshmallow frosting, assuming nothing could be bad enough frosting couldn't cover it. When I opened the oven to turn them I saw this:


And i promptly threw out the marshmallow frosting. I know! I should have saved something from this ordeal, but I was defeated. Crushed. Kinda laughing....
I'm sure there's a moral to this story, and i think you already know what it is.
Open your eyes when you're baking! Read the damn recipe! Get the right chocolate! it all matters, believe you me.

can't stop thinking about cupcakes of course!

ah, i'm such a walking cliche. I love cupcakes. join the club!
By now we have all seen the obligatory picture of me eating a cupcake....eating cupcakes at work! on a train! in a cave! under the table! oh, you haven't seen all of those? some things are best kept private, eh?
so, I can honestly say I have had close to the perfect cupcake. the holy grail of cupcakes, something dreamed about by the cupcake fanatic. where did i find this godly cupcake? Billy Bakery!
Last week Shmoops came to the big bad city to celebrate my 24th (!) birthday. Dinner, drinks, dessert, and LOST. it's all a sunny robot ever wanted. We ate dinner at an unremarkable restaurant, but I knew that i was saving myself for dessert anyway (as always). I had seen this place on a Mod 1 bakery tour, but did not sample any of their treats, I just gawked outside the window like a slobbering fool. (who am I kidding, I am a slobbering fool). Shmoops and I both got a slice of cake, and a cupcake to enjoy at work on my actual birthday. I got the Chocolate cake with vanilla buttercream frosting, she got a coconut cake with fluffy white icing. Because it was late in the evening, mom ended getting the rest of the cake, the end of the night special. I picked up the chocolate cupcake with pink frosting to enjoy the next day and we went home to find out what the hell was in that hatch.
I opened presents and we munched on cake, very very sweet frosting, excellent cake. Considering the time of day, and assuming the cake had been out all day, it hadn't dried out a bit. we fell asleep after a brief sugar high...
The next day:
My birthday! but that was besides the point, the cupcake was the true star that day.
I ate it around 230, when my eyelids get heavy and i would eat my pencil to keep me busy. There is no way my description will ever do this cake justice. The combination of cake and frosting was perfect , the buttercream was sweet but it's supposed to be, and they got it just right.

The cake tasted like rich chocolate; unlike so many chocolate cakes that could pass for vanilla with brown food coloring.I almost cried. Granted, I cry alot, but this was heavenly. Angels, Zac Efron, whatever god you pray to, he lives at Billy's Bakery.

Simulation Sunday

This past Sunday was cookie day at school. Sounds harmless enough, right?
WRONG.
**********
Class met promptly at 9am. I was a bit late, due to "slow trains" (read: not waking up). I am cranky because our classroom is the only classroom in the WORLD that doesn't have a coffee machine....I also tend to exaggerate a situation when i'm cranky. Chef comes in and we quickly start the day; a rough outline is finish the cake from Saturday, meet with your team, and start making cookies like you've never made cookies before. we had to be ready by 3; time to clean up and be ready for our presentation and guests at 4. annnnnd GO!
I had the infinite pleasure of working with Sam, often featured in this blog when i talk about drinking with school buddies. Somehow, although I consider her the one I am closest to in class, we have never worked together. Friday night at Blue and Gold we planned to work together, mischievous grins and clanking of beer cans solidified the decision. We met up, and although I had the role of Sous Chef (due to losing a cut throat round of Rock,Paper, Scissors) we worked together from the start. The first, and perhaps most difficult task was to organize the recipes in a way that prep time and oven time was most sufficent. For example, the vanilla sablee dough for the Checkerboard cookies needed to be chilled so should be made first; the date filling for the Mamoul's (a rosewater cookies with date filling, yum!) needed to be made and cooled before it could be assembled. So we mapped out our morning and afternoon, thinking to ourselves, "damn we could catch a long lunch and large pint before 3!" Ah, so naive we once were...
The first mistake was made when I, the sous chef (a title that was promptly revoked) began preparing the Mamoul dough, damn near convinced it was the vanilla sablee. OOPS! Sam sweetly, knowing saw the mistake before I, and says "whatcha making there?" I begin to answer, pointing to the wrong recipe "this right.....RATS!"
or some expletive. let's say it was RATS though.
After that snafu, things went rather smoothly, adhering to the practice of getting one big mistake out of the way, as to have a smooth sail for the rest of the day. (that's what you tell yourself when you mess up at 10:30am). So! with the Mamoul dough ready, and setting aside til we actually needed it, we were on our way.
We quickly realized the difficulty of the task at hand, 6 batches of cookies in 4 hours. Unknown to us, ours is the first class that has ever attempted to cram all the cookies in one day with a presentation open to guests at the end. Had we known this, our feelings of inadequacy and incompetence might have been reduced, but no one wants that. Scrambling ensued, lunch was never consumed, ovens/racks/table/sinks were packed to the brim. One of the tricks to baking cookies is to wait until all the racks are ready to go in, so your baking times are easier to keep track of. Up until about 2:15 did this method work, then it was every cookie for himself.
Once the recipe pages settled quietly to the ground and the mixers, one by one, were put under the table; underneath all the chaos, was a glimpse into the lives we were all heading to. Cookie day was the day that most resembled a working kitchen, with high product turnouts and 10 things going on at once. A normal day at school is recipe, production, decorating, pack. (Repeat times 6 months) But this large operation and limited space was a true testament to the industry. And it was incredible. getting shit done, working together (thank god for sam!), being organized, tidy and efficient, all these lessons we have learned since January came into play and it was a clear view of how people worked together, or didn't work together.

At the end of the day we had a beautiful presentation. Biscotti, brownies, lemon bars, Mamouls, Jaques Torres chocolate chip cookies, Rugelach, macarons....and on and on into the horizon. our guests came, and we showed off our labor of love. tired and hungry we dove into the cookies, which gave us a giddy sugar high;and on the subway ride home, i experienced the inevitable sugar crash. But it was a good feeling, feeling accomplished, full and sleepy. A feeling I expect to experience very often in the future.

Rabble

Feeling very scattered this Wednesday afternoon, and people always like to read in cohesive and fractured sentences right? RIGHT?! A few things:
I tried to make clotted cream last night. It took about 3 hours, and I had to get up at 1:50am to tend to it. It had to be refrigerated at a certain time and the process took much longer than I had imagined, so I set my alarm....
Since it's my birthday week I have thrown caution (read: my diet) to the wind and have not held back. Chocolates, bagels, Chinese food. I made 2 batches of chocolate chip cookies last night to "organize the pantry" by using up alll the ingredients i had. Scones, the aforementioned clotted cream, chips, more cookies, chips and beer, ah the list goes on, but it's only going to grow as my actual birthday approaches, aha.
I fell asleep on my lunch break today. There I was sitting in the public atrium across from my office, sipping on a diet coke and reading Dune.......
-15 MINUTES PASS-
I am startled awake my that awful feeling of falling asleep somewhere you shouldn't have. I frantically check the time, see that I am still on break, and then rummage though my bag, checking for my wallet, phone, ipod, my beloved hair brush, etc.
The dishwasher at work has broken. I am pretty sure I should do something about it, but I have no idea where to start.
Ugh. people are so snobby when talking about food. Like last night when i was trying to explain to Jamie what exactly was a double boiler....man was I being a bitch. Sorry dude. and, p.s. you were right....