#4: Beautiful-on-the-inside Cupcakes

the experiment of today was the yummiest cupcakes ever. light, fluffy, hint o' vanilla, altogether delicious. i knew that the recipe had to be good, because it's from Amy Sedaris' book, and that woman may be insane, but she knows her baked goods (and bad wigs). plus this is the recipe that funds her rabbit Dusty. anything that supports a fluffy bunny has to be good.

so to test out the cupcake batter, i decided to make pineapple upside-down cupcakes. they seemed like a good idea at the time. a little brown sugar and butter, little canned fruit, and voila! cupakes! except for one problem. there are two things that i fear a lot in baking. one is that things will stick to muffin tins, and the other is that anything with sugar in it will harden and never ever come off. well, those two combined wonderfully to make it a massive bitch to get those suckers out of the tins. maybe i should use this as an excuse to go buy those lovely wiggly silicone ones. but yeah, about 2/3 of the pineapple decided that it would rather stay in the cups, and not on the cupcakes. oh poop. well, i scraped the stuff out and put it on the cakes anyway. so there, stupid pineapple, i'll eat you anyway.

thus the end result, while very tasty, made some of the fugliest cupcakes ever. seriously, they looked like the results of some 5 year old. eh, close your eyes, and take a bite. serve them to your close friends who wont judge you and are grateful for any homemade baked goods/free food that they can get. aka: the people who will still love you and won't judge you for not getting out of your pj's for the 5th day in a row. if they don't mind how much of a mess you look, they won't mind how much of a mess your cupcakes look.

the pineapple, cherry, and brown sugar melded really nicely with the cake, but i don't think that i'll be making these again any time soon. they are good for slumming it around the house, but little else. too much of a mess. however, the same batter with a traditional frosting top, seems like a good idea. this will have to be a later experiment...

Third experiment: Milan(o) Cookies

[Experiments -1, 1, 2 to be recapped later]

Today i took a break off of muffins, and attempted a recipe for 'Milan' cookies that I yoinked from foodtv.com. Tack an 'O' on the end of that to get the nice Pepperidge Farm people mad at you. They turned out fabulous, if a bit lumpy and irregular, from the fact that i don't have a pastry bag, and so had to either use a ziploc bag or a squeezy bottle (I opted for the latter) and it's hard to get uniform cookies that way.

I ended up with little crispy wafery lemony-vanilla cookies, with a orange-chocolate ganache inside. mmm. i feel the diabetes coming on; too much sampling. Only real problem is getting the filling to set up properly in a kitchen that was over-heated by my oven. That and the fact that the stupid recipe didnt call for any salt. Seriously, WTF? It took a while to realize that that was what tasted so bland. Still, yummy cookies, that people other than me need to eat. ...NOW!

i <3 KitchenAid Mixer

Update: upon field testing, it seems that they can get a little squishy after being tupperwared for an hour or three. well, the baking timing is tricky because a minute too much and they are too browned, and a minute too little and they aren't crispy enough. well, sitting all packaged up also leads to a little bit of chewy/squishy-ness. instead of yummy crispy-ness. probably just needs about a day of sitting out in the air to get stale. the chewy cookies are still fine, but just not as satisfying

Yay, a blog!

Brilliant idea Laurel, because the only thing better than wasting time baking is to waste time documenting it on the internet. and in pink! I haven't had a blog since the 18-20 year old LiveJournal years. */shame*

Our dream of making some money out of all the baking means that its going to be a long hard january/february/march of trying out recipes and feeding the good stuff to our focus group of friends, and the bad stuff to the squirrels in my backyard. That and a lot of bad grammar and punctuation on this blog, because i can't be bothered to use the Shift key.

So lets get started with the two girls with delicious food, a crazy dream, and a very pink blog. because it's wednesday, and everybody, including blogs, has to wear pink today.

Let the baking commence!

Hey, why not? I thought that in this delicious new endeavor it would be useful to have a record of our "assignments", of things that work, of things that don't work and should never be mentioned again, of ideas to try, of recipes to share, of snide remarks... and so on!

My first assignment: delicious muffins

I read the section on muffins in "The Joy of Cooking" this morning, then (gasp!) followed the recipe exactly, with their exact measurements and ingredients. This is not something I usually do! I used their basic muffin recipe and added a cup or so of frozen blueberries [after sprinkling them with sugar and allowing them to marinate for a while]. The result -- delicious muffins! They got pretty big, had a delicious vanilla-y buttery flavor, and had a nice crumb. The blueberries were tart but not -too- tart, which has been the case whenever I've tried to make blueberry muffins before. I used butter this time, so I'm interested in seeing how using oil changes the flavor. Also, the flavor of these was fantastic, but I would like to see these muffins bigger and with more fluffitude.