Chocolate Cupcakes and Risk

For one of my classes, I had to design a survey about anything I wanted and administer it to at least twenty people. So I decided to ask people about cupcakes. The incentive was that I would make the winning cupcake and bring it to class. Part of the homework was to make a powerpoint about our survey and be prepared to present it. Really, I just had an itch to make something, so this become my excuse.


Though I was not chosen to present, I did make cupcakes for the class. Here's the takeaway: people have really boring cupcake preferences. My survey split up cake preferences and frosting preferences, which dilutes the power of the whole cupcake. Having frosting and cake split like that makes it difficult to convince people of the deliciousness of more unusual cupcakes. Thus, my colleagues chose chocolate cake and chocolate frosting. I dutifully made them, wishing that the mint julep cupcake had won instead.


What I've derived from this assignment is that creativity probably can't be managed by democracy. Whether it's cake, cookies, or art, I suspect that people are open to new things, but only when they are completed. The audience needs to be convinced. If your product is conventional, this process is pretty easy. But if your product is beyond the norm (avant-garde art or sazerac cupcakes), the audience needs to be sold. If I had asked people if they were interested in a mint julep cupcake, I may have gotten more positive responses that I did by asking if people were interested in bourbon cake and mint frosting. My my audience isn't as risk-averse as my survey indicates.


So how do creative people get funding for their work when there's this conventional, risk-averse bias? After all, conventional wisdom is often wrong. Having a whole vision and being able to communicate it definitely helps. Crowd funders like Kickstarter can also funnel cash towards artists whose work wouldn't get funding from traditional sources. But there are artists out there who are doing visionary work, and the crowd's lack of interest doesn't make the work any less great. How can they get support? Will the starving visionary always be with us? How can an artist convince the market to take a risk, especially in our fractured culture?


I don't know. But in the meantime, I can make the best chocolate chocolate cupcake possible. I will save my boozy adventure cupcakes for another day. My recipe follows. The cake is from Orangette, the frosting is the recipe is adapted from inside the Baker's Chocolate box.


Cake Ingredients:


3 oz semisweet chocolate
1 ½ cups hot brewed coffee
3 cups sugar
2 ½ cups unbleached all-purpose flour
1 ½ cups unsweetened cocoa powder
2 tsp baking soda
¾ tsp baking powder
1 ¼ tsp salt
3 large eggs
¾ cup canola oil
1 ½ cups buttermilk
¾ tsp pure vanilla extract

Cake Directions:

Preheat the oven to 300 degrees. Line a muffin tin with paper liners.

Pour the hot coffee over the chocolate and stir until melted. Beat the eggs for 3 minutes or so, until they are lemon colored and a little foamy. Slowly add the oil, buttermilk, vanilla, and melted chocolate to the eggs and beat until completely combined. Add all the dry ingredients (sugar, flour, cocoa, baking soda and baking powder), and beat until smooth. The batter will be quite liquidy.

Fill cupcake liners 2/3 of the way full. Bake for 20-25 minutes. Remove from pan and let cool completely. Recipe makes 36-40 cupcakes. These came out quite flat on top, and very moist. If you want a more domed cupcake, I would consider raising the oven temperature and cooking for less time.

Frosting Ingredients:

4 oz unsweetened chocolate

1 stick (1/2 cup) butter, softened

1/2 to 1 lb powdered sugar

1/3 cup milk

1 t vanilla

Frosting Directions:

Melt the chocolate in a large saucepan on the stove. Let it cool for 5 minutes, then beat in the butter, sugar and vanilla with an electric mixer. You need at least half a pound of sugar. If you want sweeter frosting, use more. The more sugar you use, the more frosting you will get. Beat in the milk bit by bit, until you get the desired consistency, which should be smooth and a light brown color. The amount of milk will vary by the amount of sugar.

Cheater's Frosting Directions: 

Melt the chocolate and butter together in a saucepan over low heat on the stove. Whisk in the vanilla and sugar, adding milk to thin it out to the right color and smoothness. I like this method because less gets dirty.

Using a knife or a spatula, frost cupcakes. With the half pound version, there will be enough for each cupcake to get nice layer. If you like loads of frosting (I don't), you'll have to make the sweeter version, or more of the semi-sweet version.

And my powerpoint, should you be interested:

Cupcakes

King Cake and Homesickness

It is no longer king cake season. King cakes may only be eaten between January 6 (the epiphany) and Mardi Gras day. Let me get that out of the way. With that disclaimer, let's get down to it.



I lived in New Orleans for 6.5 years of my adult life. I've lived lots of places over the years, but New Orleans feels like home for me. It felt that way my first day, and again when I went back for Mardi Gras this past week.

What amazed me this time is how my experience of the city has changed. I went to Tulane for undergrad, and for at least 3 of those years, my experience of New Orleans was fairly superficial. I went out, but I wasn't a local, or even really a legitimate resident. A big part of that is the nature of college. The whole point of the college experience is to separate young people from their families and home culture for a time while they learn (hopefully) to grow up. Which isn't conducive to embedding yourself in a place. That happens after.

Katrina hit when I was 21. It still reverberates through my life, and the lessons I learned during that time have guided my choices, for better and for worse. I moved back for two years when I was 25. My second stint in New Orleans was in many ways richer than my first. Most of the people I had known were gone, and I made an entirely new set of friends. I didn't work regularly during those two years; the job market isn't that great, and I had no idea what to do with myself. Instead I spent my time working temp jobs and restaurant jobs while I figured myself out. Everyone should do that, preferably when they're young and being broke doesn't hurt as much.

Moving to Boston has been great in many ways. The Gentleman in Question lives nearby, I have some awesome friends, school is going reasonably well, and I'm on a roller derby team. But it doesn't feel like home yet. I made myself a king cake for carnival season, because homesickness required one, but the budget wouldn't allow shipping one. It costs somewhere around $40 to ship a king cake, and they're not very good when stale. Better to make my own. So here's John Besh's recipe, to keep in your back pocket for next carnival season.

Cake Ingredients:
1 cup warm water
1/2 cup sugar
2 tablespoons dry yeast (I used two packets)
3 3/4 cup flour
1 cup melted butter
5 egg yolks, beaten
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 teaspoon lemon zest
3 teaspoons cinnamon
grated nutmeg ( as much as you want)

Icing Ingredients:
2 cups powdered sugar
1 teaspoon lemon juice
milk
purple, green, and yellow sugar (Purple is hard to find. Use food coloring to make it)
plastic baby, or a bean if going out is too much bother
 
Directions:
Whisk together the water, sugar, yeast, and a tablespoon of the flour. Wait for it to get foamy (only a few minutes), then whisk in butter, eggs, vanilla, and lemon zest. Fold in the flour, cinnamon, and nutmeg. Once the dough comes together, take it out of the bowl and knead it for 15 minutes on a flat surface. The dough will feel very oily because of all the butter. Embrace your inner Paula Dean.

Put the dough back in a bowl and cover with plastic wrap. Let it rise for 1-2 hours, until it's about double in size. Punch it down, then remove it from the bowl and roll it out to a large rectangle. You have options here. You can spread some filling on top (popular versions are cream cheese, cherry, and pecan. I used homemade jam), and roll it up like a cinnamon roll, only instead of slicing mash the two ends together. Alternatively, you can do what Besh suggests and cut the rectangle into three strips and braid them together, mashing the ends together. Either way, the goal is to form the dough into a ring.

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees, and let your ring rise for 30 minutes. Bake in the oven for 20 minutes. Besh suggests 30, but mine was done between 15 and 20. Cool the cake completely.

Make the icing by combining the sugar, lemon juice and milk. The icing should be quite thick, so add the milk a tablespoon at a time until you get the texture you want. Insert the baby in the bottom of the cake, then smear the icing all over the cake (which if you're smart you've put on a lined platter/cookie sheet). Top with colored sugars.

Ta Da! Also, fair warning, this cake is ENORMOUS. It takes up one full sized cookie sheet. I tried to halve the recipe, and it wasn't as good. It's hard to figure out how to halve an odd number of egg yolks. So embrace the epic amount of king cake, and make your friends help you eat it. That's the point of it, to share good times with people you like, or at the very least civilly tolerate.

Gumbo Methodology

Now that I live in the frozen, yet unsnowy north, I have to make gumbo if I want it. I learned this lesson in New Jersey, where I would see gumbo on the menu and foolishly order it. People seem to think it's the same thing as soup. And while soup is good, it serves a different purpose than gumbo. I've been making versions of this since late 2006, and I like my way because it's more of a method than a recipe. I use it to clear out the fridge of vegetables on the edge.

Traditionalists would be appalled, but I don't much care. To my thinking, gumbo really only requires a few elements to be legitimate: roux, either okra or file, and the trinity of celery, onion, and green pepper. Everything else is negotiable. I also use an unconventional method to make roux, stolen from Alton Brown. He makes it in the oven to prevent burning, which I think is genius. It takes longer, but is foolproof.

The gumbo method is: make roux, cook vegetables in roux, add liquid, add meat, finish with a secondary thickener. There are many varieties, including a tomato based version, and versions without meat. There's a lot of room to play around. Just remember, if someone serves you a gumbo that isn't thickened, then they're cheating.

Ingredients:

Roux:
1/2 cup flour
1/2 cup fat (oil or melted butter, your choice)

Vegetables:
1 medium onion, chopped
2-3 stalks celery, chopped
1 green pepper, chopped
Other random vegetables (greens are an excellent choice, but you can use anything)
Creole seasoning
Thyme
1 quart chicken stock

Meat (any or all, or none, as you prefer):
1 chopped chicken breast
2 links andouille
1 lb shrimp

Secondary Thickener:
1/2 lb sliced okra OR 1 tablespoon file powder (never both)

Directions:

To make the roux, whisk together the flour and fat in an oven safe pot. Bake in an oven at 350 for 1 to 1.5 hours, stirring once every 30 minutes. Color is the most important thing here, it should have a walnuty color or darker. You may need longer to achieve it.

Once the roux is done, move the pot to the stove on medium heat. Add your vegetables and stir them. Stir in creole seasoning and thyme to taste. It shouldn't be very spicy, but have a lot of flavor. Cook vegetables and seasoning for a few minutes, until the onions are soft. Add the chicken stock and stir. Once it boils, reduce heat to a simmer.

If you're using chicken or sausage, brown those meats in a separate pan and add them to the pot. That keeps the gumbo from getting greasy. If you're using shrimp, add them 15-20 minutes before you plan to serve your gumbo.

If using okra, add it now. You'll need to cook your gumbo for at least an hour after this, until the okra is no longer slimy.

If using file, stir in 1 tablespoon 15 minutes before serving.

Serve over rice, with hot sauce on the side. Crystal is best, but Tabasco is usually all that's available. The texture should be somewhere between soup and gravy.

Bourbon Bacon Jam

I'm still on break, so I've been doing some fairly ridiculous and/or hardcore things. Roller derby for one. I joined NH Roller Derby. I get drafted onto a team at the end of the month, which is super exciting! I've also taken the opportunity to spend more time with the Gentleman in Question.

Thursday, he presented me with a truly ridiculous idea: spreadable bacon. He'd eaten it over Thanksgiving at a friend's house, and even had a recipe. So obviously we had to try it. I've made a few traditional jams before (I'll tell you about the Strawberry Thyme Balsamic jam soon, and maybe the Blueberry Ginger Orange), but the concept of meat jam seemed odd to me. It was the bourbon that convinced me. Last night, we put it together, which was a nice distraction from the Saints loss. Then the Gentleman convinced me to watch The A-Team, cementing the ridiculous trend.

We used this recipe from Serious Eats, with a modification. The Gentleman is partial to shallots, so we substituted a bunch of them for one of the onions. I admit that we didn't really measure that, and eyeballed it instead. Otherwise, we followed the recipe exactly. I have to say, it's delicious. It's savory, and sweet. It'd be good with fried eggs.


Ingredients:

1 1/2 pounds bacon (nothing fancy, just ordinary bacon)
1 medium onion, diced
4-5 large shallots (equal approximately to the size of the onion), diced
3 medium cloves garlic, diced
1/2 cup cider vinegar
1/4 cup maple syrup (use grade B for a strong maple flavor)
6 tablespoons coffee
6 tablespoons bourbon
1/2 cup packed dark brown sugar

Directions:


Chop the bacon into 1 inch pieces, and cook in a skillet until just crisp. You will probably need two skillets, or have to do this step in batches. Unless you have a giant cast iron skillet of doom, like the Gentleman.

Remove the bacon and drain it on a paper towel (which you've smartly layered on top of some tin foil to keep your counters from getting greasy). Pour off all but 1 tablespoon of the bacon fat. Sauté the onion, shallot, and garlic in the bacon fat until the onion is soft. 5-10ish minutes should do it.

Pour in the vinegar, syrup, coffee, bourbon, and sugar. Stir vigorously, and scrape up any bits that are stuck to the pan. Bring it to a boil (shouldn't take long), then boil it for 2 minutes. Add the bacon back in and give it a nice stir.

Move the whole mix to a crockpot, and cook on high uncovered for 3 1/2 to 4 hours. Ours only took 3 1/2. You can cook it less if you want a more jammy texture, or put the cover on.





Move the whole mix again to a food processor, or a blender, or a chintzy supermarket chopper, and pulse a few times until the mix is chopped into a paste. Put your bacon spread into clean canning jars and store in the fridge. We got about 16oz of spread.

And 8 oz of bacon grease.

Short Term Wins

Clearly business school ate my life. The end of my first semester was a scramble to get everything done, with a nice healthy dose of misplaced self doubt. I did make things, I swear, but nothing all that spectacular, nothing worth putting down the accounting and fundraising projects to write about.

My creative mojo is starting to return however. School prevented me from engaging in another Christmas cookie extravaganza, and the disappointment about that seems to have jump started me. But there is an obstacle: the unfinished objects. There are bins in my room of yarn and knitting projects that were started and abandoned. Several are at least three years old, dating to my time in New Jersey.

And then there is the sweater. It looms. It sulks. It nags like a mom who doesn't like your boyfriend. I started the damn thing well over a year ago. And while I lived in New Orleans, I had the excuse of it being too hot to work with thick, shed-prone wool. Not so in Boston, and the truth is, I have made progress. The sleeves are almost done. But it lags. I knit and knit, and yet feel no closer to the finish line.

What I need is a short term win. The concept came up in my organizational behavior class last semester. The basic idea (as I remember it, which is to say that I could be completely wrong, but I don't care) is that early success in an endeavor keeps people energized to continue to work towards their long term goals. There needs to be a small, tangible reward at the beginning to serve as motivation, and as reinforcement. It seemed incredibly intuitive to me, and I'd figured out a version of the sentiment when I was teaching knitting during my time at Down Cellar.

Learning to knit is definitely a long term project. For many new knitters, it can take a few projects to really get the hang of it. In my personal experience, the first object or two that you make will be terrible. That's just the nature of learning something new. At the time, I figured that it was best for beginners to make things that were cheap and quick, to bolster their confidence. The Yarn Harlot said it first, as she believes that the ideal first project is a hat, rather than the traditional scarf, precisely because they don't take long to make, and the joy of finishing something can spur you to start another project.

 Her suggestion has stuck with me after all these years. I find myself stuck on the Icelandic sweater. My confidence and desire to work on it is lagging. What I need is a booster. A reminder that I am a proficient former professional knitter. No sweater will hold me down, dammit! So I took the Yarn Harlot's advice, and knit a hat. It took three days, and is made from the abandoned roller derby helmet panty I started for Running of the Bulls, back in July. I will make a pair of fingerless gloves to go with it, and then redouble my efforts on the sweater.

My Devious Plan to get a New Oven

Well. It's been a while, I see. Whoops. So. How to sum up the past few months before we move onto the important thing, namely cake and new ovens? The best way to describe my summer is that involved a lot of pizza and a lot of roller derby, as I worked in two different pizza joints and worked hard on my skating. Big Easy Rollergirls taught me everything I know about skating and made my last year in New Orleans amazing! I spent a lot time with my friends, especially my wolf pack, and became a regular at Twelve Mile Limit, the best snobby cocktail bar I've come across. But, come August, it was time to move again.

I moved to Boston to start my non-profit management MBA at the Heller School. It's a huge change in identity, and so far it's great! My roommate also lived in New Orleans, and her sister is a friend of mine (before we settled on that, I interviewed some truly weird potential roommates. Maybe I'll tell you about it someday). Going back to school does leave less room for creative pursuits, but I've managed somehow. Soon I'll tell you about the beer brewing in recon room of my apartment, but for now, I'll restrict my comments to the oven situation.

The apartment is lovely, but the kitchen is best described as...dated. The oven and fridge are avocado green, the floor and backsplash tiles are brown. It's 70s-tastic. The oven never worked very well, as the door would only open with a fight, and fell off every so often. The fridge is the antithesis of energy efficient. So really, using the kitchen could be an exercise in slapstick comedy. It all came to a head Thursday night. The Gentleman in Question has a nice round birthday in a few days, and I had promised him cake. After some effort, I had the batter in the pans ready to go, so I opened the oven door. Big mistake. The door came flying off, crazy hot, and crashed to the floor. I couldn't get it back on. The landlord came over, and we discovered the hinges were warped. His wife kindly baked the cake for me, and our oven door is leaning against the door to the porch. As of Thursday night, there was talk of getting a new oven. My roommate is quite pleased with that turn of events, and the Gentleman is scheming a way to get me a new refrigerator.

The cake was totally worth it. The Gentleman requested some combination of chocolate and raspberry, and being an overachiever, I decided to do a checkerboard with those flavors. To get the checkerboard effect, you need a plastic insert. It comes in a kit. There are many options, so investigate. The pans in the kit I linked to are pretty nice. Once you have that essential piece of equipment, the rest is fairly simple. Finding recipes can be tricky, because the two cake flavors need to have similar textures, and bake at the same temperature for the same amount of time. Raspberry cake was an additional challenge. Every recipe involved jello. Which is creepy. Until Smitten Kitchen saved the day, with her adapted Pink Lady Cake recipe. I changed it further, cutting it in half and subbing in raspberries. For the chocolate, I went with this recipe from Joy of Baking, also cut in half. The raspberry flavor shines through, and the chocolate is rich without being too sweet. My cake came out extra dense and not as checkerboardy because of the baking drama, but yours will turn out light and delightful. You'll get three bowls dirty making these cakes, so the mess isn't too bad.

Mardi Gras

It ate my life. It does that. So one of the great things about Mardi Gras is that in celebrating it, you make new friends and cement old friendships. There is a camaraderie on the parade route. With cheap beer as a social lubricant, and a friendly smile, you can accomplish most things during Carnival. Except driving and parking downtown. As I relearned, that is a fool's errand.

But you develop your own personal krewe during the two week slog of day drinking. These are the people that you call and text every morning to decide on what you're going to do that day. Plans vaguely alluded to the night before come together. Mardi Gras mostly happens on the weekends, but, the Thursday before, it becomes an every day, all day adventure.

Some parade goers get really angry and shouty. Thus, for Endymion, my krewe had to search pretty hard for a spot to stand. By contrast, for Proteus and Orpheus, our neighbors were friendly. And that's generally the theme during Mardi Gras. I always meet new people, usually out of town friends visiting my people, or the kindly souls who live near the parade route and open their houses (and their bathrooms) to me, as a friend of a friend.

I'm a Mardi Gras veteran. Some years I'm more into it than others. Last year was particularly intense, seeing as it was Lombardi Gras. This year was a middle of the road year for me. But the new aspect was that for the first time, I was in a parade! Two in fact. As a rollergirl, I had the opportunity to skate in Pontchartrain and walk in Muses. Being in the parade is a completely different experience. Instead of trying to catch cheap beads, I was throwing them. But I decided to mix it up. I threw skate wheels! I painted them black and gold.

Unfortunately, I almost broke my friend's nose and busted all the liquor in the process. I was aiming a wheel at my roommate, and flung it pretty hard at his face, because I wanted to and I knew he'd catch it in time. But I failed to factor in my forward momentum as I skated along. So I missed and it went straight at my other friend's nose. He was holding the cooler of cheap beer and cheaper liquor, and was completely helpless. I saw the look of terror pass over his face as my roommate reached out and ninja grabbed the wheel, saving the booze.

Just one of my many adventures of the past two weeks.