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....

Friday Link

On a busy Friday at work, a co-worker (named Michelle, so yes she is cool as hell) directed me to a link. My fascination and dedication to baking is common knowledge here, as it is most places. I clicked the link and was directed to an event planner's website.
I fell in love. It is beautifully crafted, put together, and thought out. Perhaps after years in a kitchen,(if I survive) I can retire to doing this.

The last day I made pancakes....EVER.

After a lovely Memorial Day weekend, filed with cupcakes, black bean burgers,blueberry shortcakes with Lemon and Thyme Biscuits, corn on the cob and anything else me and shmoops' mind could imagine, I decided to make pancakes for the family brunch. Before we all headed back to work and school and the "real" world.
one of the first cooking endeavors I ever embarked on was making pancakes. One Easter back on Ardsley street, when i was a wee sunny robot, I wanted to make chocolate chip pancakes for breakfast. Blissfully unaware I put the entire bag of chocolate chips in the batter. I love chocolate as much, if not more as the next guy, but it was basically fried chocolate with speckles of pancake batter. awesome.
I then got into my head that i was very good at making pancakes, and would invite Brandon over for Pink Pancakes with Whipped Cream instead of syrup. Ah, to be young and foolish.
In the years that followed, no one ever told me my pancakes were rubbish, and I even volunteered to feed the entire camp at Billstock(a tradition my father and his childhood friends will never ever break)
So, for some reason I thought pancakes were a staple of my culinary past, present and future. However, after last Monday, I will never make pancakes again. And this is how it went down.
First of all, a telltale sign that I am not pleased is this face:

And this is before it even got underway! Grumpy, sweaty, hungry, expletives racing out of my mouth faster than the horses in the Kentucky Derby.
I made the pancakes from a pre-made batter and buttermilk, not exactly a difficult process.

At first i made the batter too thick, the pancakes were consistently coming out burned on the outside and VERY uncooked in the middle. Out they went! Not even Molly wouldn't eat them, and she eats almost anything. (except for dog food)
So then I thinned out the batter, and it started going much smoother. Except for the fact that they took


for.




ever.

It was insane. my family was starving, I had plowed through about 7 cups of coffee; I honestly have no idea why they took so long, I blame most of it on my profound impatience. I covered them and they cooked much more evenly and swiftly, so that was nice.

But after 45 minutes(!!!)I only got about 15 "good" ones. And I didn't eat a single one...out of spite.
I don't know why this pissed me off so much, but I remember exclaiming, and meaning "I AM NEVER MAKING PANCAKES AGAIN!"

so there.

Metric loves LOST or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Song

When I was a child, like all children I wanted to be a million different things when I grew up. I wanted desperately to be an actress, to be Harriet the Spy, a singer, a garbage truck driver, a seal, a philosopher, a wall painter, a music video director, a dog walker...you get the point. (oddly enough, pastry chef, the one thing i am actually pursuing came later in life) Some of those carried over into my later years; I am a terrific eavesdropper (harriet), i majored in acting for exactly one semester, I did paint my walls once, and I interviewed to be a dog walker. others, such as the seal, garbage truck driver, well those never quite materialized. But today, I got to live out a favorite of mine. A music video director. because, you see, today is the today i completely understood a song, what the singer was talking about word for word, and I had the images to correspond with them. Today is the day I learned that one my favorite bands, Metric, loves my FAVORITE show, Lost.
I first heard this song last week, on my trip home from Boston. it was raining very hard and the Chinatown bus was going very fast. at first i just heard the melody, and i liked it....alot. so i played it again, and the second line "Tell the survivors help is on the way" immediately made me think of my favorite survivors from Flight 815. so i listened closely and realized, that every word had some semblance of being stranded on that island. If you click the picture above, (which I strongly recommend you do. if nothing, it will illustrate to you my urgency -in the scribbled handwriting- to make each connection.)
So, this morning i was on the subway and the song came on again. This time i could not let it go! Now, as a watchable music video, I have directed not. but I have picked some of my favorite images from Lost and lined them up with the lyrics I am almost certain Metric made for them. So, here are a few:
"Tell the survivors help is on the way"
-While on the Others compound, they see Flight 815 break into 2. This is intended to be quite ironic, since (spoiler alert!) the Others have no intention of actually helping the survivors...
"Got us a battle, leave it up to me"
-Ugh, this one kills me. all I can think of is Charlie in the looking glass, holding up his hand...water filling up...i don't remember much of that scene because I was too busy weeping uncontrollably.
"Find us a trap door, find us a plane
Tell the survivors help is on the way"
This one is the kicker. Before this lyric, it could have all been coincidence, but COME ON! Trap door= hatch door. Plane= Mr. Echo's drug plane. OBVI.
but for this part i would like to imagine that breathtaking image of Locke pounding on the hatch door, and then....like from Heaven underground, a light shines on him...and everyone on the island and in the audience feels hope. (or dread.)
"I was the one with the world at my feet
Got us a battle, leave it up to me"
For this part, all I can think of is Jack pre-Island. His crumbling marriage, his developing alcoholism, his forgetfulness to shave...
the battle he needs to fight is apparent, and he refuses help from anyone else to take the burden of the island off his shoulders. I have a hard time feeling sympathy though, cause he's such a goddamn baby.
the Chorus goes "What it is and where it stops nobody knows
You gave me a life I never chose
I wanna leave but the world won't let me go"
and it all comes together. what is the island? (miracles, monsters, polar bears?!) when is the island (time travel?), where the hell is the island? "Nobody Knows". Although science is choice and logic, destiny forgoes both of those, and that is what has been forced upon the survivors. and they can't get off!! THE ISLAND!! it keeps bringing them back even when they have finally reached home. The numbers are everywhere, following poor huge Hurley wherever he goes. everything seems to be connected to the island, it all comes back.
So, I know, it's not really a music video, but I'm not a music video director now am I? No, I'm not. I'm just a hopeless little baker who can't stop think about Lost. But I'm glad I'm not the only one...I'm on to you, Metric.