Chinese Fighting Cupcakes

First post from the new kitchen! Before anything else, let’s all just gaze upon a photo of my beautiful baking cabinet:

I have so much counter space and I have space to store all my ingredients! It’s mind boggling! FYI, this does not make me any better at baking. During the unpacking process, I was flipping through the Cake Boss cookbook and I decided that it was time and I really wanted to try my hand at a piping bag. Buddy recommends starting with cupcakes to get some of the piping techniques down before advancing to cakes and that seemed fair to me. So begins a multistage process that leaves me with a mess and Chinese Fighting Cupcakes (a cupcake to anyone who understands this reference by the end of the post).

To start with, I (obviously) had to make some cupcakes. Now, I fully intended to be lazy here. I was working from home last week because Mother Nature decided it would be delightful to dump a heap of snow on us and I knew I had some box cake mix so I figured “the point of this is piping, not to make fancy cupcakes from scratch. Box cupcakes it is!” Unfortunately, the box cake I thought I had was actually brownie mix. And it was snowing. So I wasn't about to go out and buy some. No big deal though, I can make cupcakes like a pro from scratch. Here was my critical mistake though: I got lazy and didn't want to search for a recipe I knew worked well and just took the first recipe for chocolate cupcakes that popped up on the internets. BIG MISTAKE. Even though I’m a million percent sure I followed the recipe perfectly, these cupcakes did not turn out well. They were hard as rocks. Dense. Awful. Sadness. Now, I didn't actually find this out until we ate them but it was sad nonetheless. And before you even suggest it, I did not overcook the cupcakes. They were underbaked the first time I checked them and they were perfect 1 minute later when I took them out. It was just a bad recipe.

Ok, so enough ranting about the miserable cupcakes. More importantly, we’re talking about piping flowers. Turns out, I’m also bad at that. But we’ll get there in a minute. First I had to actually make some buttercream. I’m going to choose not to tell you how much butter and Crisco is in buttercream because it’ll only make you sad. I did love the 7.5 cups of powdered sugar that went into my mixer though. No matter what, that was always going to end in an explosion of white the second I turned the mixer on. So at approximately 7:30 in the morning, I mixed up my buttercream. This was largely uneventful besides the sugar volcano. Now, to make the flowers, I needed three colors. I decided to go with green grass and pink flowers with orange centers. Because that’s what the picture in the book did! So, first I mixed up my green. No matter what I tried and how much color gel I added, the buttercream wouldn't get any darker than a pastel green. After a while I gave up trying and just decided a light green would be fine. So I went in search of the decorating tip that Buddy recommended. Looking…looking…looking…nope. Don’t have it. Not cool people. So I picked one that looked flat-ish so I could make the flat circle of “grass” that was in the picture.

To do things properly, I even pulled out my cheap turntable/cake carrier that I bought ages ago so I could get used to using a turntable in conjunction with a piping bag. Let’s just say it took some time to get the hang of it. Getting the speed right was challenging and remembering not to move my hand was hard to do but eventually I was able to understand the mechanics of the process. There will be many pictures in this post of my triumphs and failures so here’s the first set with my range of green grass-layers:

Not great but not too bad, right? Passable? Oh, you just wait. Now I have to actually make flowers. That was just green circles, people! Child’s play! And that was already a challenge! For the flowers, I was supposed to use another tip that I absolutely did not have. No problem, I can improvise. However, none of the tips that I tried worked very well. They all made wavy patterns and none of them really looked like flower petals no matter how I tried. Oh yeah, and I had the same pastel pink issue as I did with the green except the pink looked even worse and was not at all vibrant. Anyway, I tried three different “types” of flowers but my conclusion is that they generally look like octopi, nonapi, jellyfish, or squished jellyfish. It was so sad.

On the bright side though, even though my creative piping skills leave something to be desired, I was able to consistently pipe things that were the same size, shape, and design. So I guess that’s something? Mechanically, I suppose I’m doing something right. I just may not have the creative eye. This should not surprise me at all. It probably shouldn't surprise you either at this point.

Last step was to add the orange centers. I know that the centers of flowers aren't typically orange but they’re whimsical so it’s ok. Or so I keep telling myself. And that’s what the picture had! Since I only have two piping bags, I had to wash one of them. Let me tell you something: buttercream is ridiculously hard to clean off hands, piping bags, utensils, or pretty much anything else. Cleaning a piping bag isn't easy in the best of situations and this was just crazy. It took me forever and then, as I’m looking at a still soaking wet piping bag, I decided that I could just use a Ziploc bag with the tip cut off. (Obviously, I had to clean all my stuff anyway but it was so annoying to have to do it in the middle of what I was working on.) Super annoyed at this point and thoroughly depressed by my ugly flowers, I piped in the middles. Which made them look worse. Seriously. I mean, you can see the pictures and decide but I think they look much worse with the orange. Mostly because the orange was barely orange. I really need to get this color mixing thing down better. Anyway, here’s the finished product:

So sad. And then to make everything worse, by the time I ate them, I discovered that they were dense and icky cupcakes. And to make everything worser, I had brought them over to my aunt’s for her birthday and they weren't good and I never like bringing something not good and inflicting it on other people. The only good part was the taste of the buttercream. Which was actually really good. My sister just ate that and decided to forgo the actual cupcake. Smart girl.

Well, first baking adventure out of the gate in a new kitchen and it’s basically a disaster. Sound familiar to anyone? Reminds me of the good ol’ days making cookie dough bites and pinwheel cookies. I think the key is that this was a recipe that really challenged me. And I need to keep challenging myself because well, it just makes for better stories. So until next time…

P.S. If you think of any baking challenges that you’d like to see me try, feel free to comment! There will most likely be a Tardis cake in my future sometime in August but I’m open to other ideas before then!

A Disney Moment: Dinosaur

This movie is THE WORST. Dinosaur is Black Cauldron bad. It’s Saludos Amigos bad. I can’t even explain how bad it is but it may in fact be the worst (so far). From the very first moment, it looked weird. A quick IMDB search informed us that the backgrounds are actually superimposed photos of tropical locations. Ok then. It’s not bad in theory but the technology wasn't quite there, I think. Or maybe it just looks bad because they superimposed the most detestable characters on the lovely backgrounds. The plot is basically Land Before Time (which is an excellent movie) but everything about this rendition falls flat. Aladar is a stupid name for a protagonist. Just sayin. And there are lemurs. For no reason that I understand. Let me explain the plot to you: there’s an asteroid and we have to go to the nesting grounds and we have to go there quickly or we’ll die. There’s a meaningless love story, an antagonist who was TOTALLY right, and a wandering aimlessness to the whole story. As far as the antagonist goes (and I will not refer to him as a villain), he saw a threat to his herd. He was the leader. It was a choice of either slow down for the old and sickly dinos and have everyone die or move on and wish the slow ones the best of luck. I’m sorry but if you’re talking about the survival of your species, you should probably just keep moving. Aladar and friends got lucky and found a cave to hide out in. A CAVE WITH STAIRS. Seriously, that cave has stone stairs. Few things have ever annoyed me so much in a movie. I was literally yelling at the screen. Ask my sister. And then Aladar is a really obnoxious know-it-all when he finally does catch up to the herd so why would anyone be listening to this guy they just met? The whole movie is fraught with implausibility. Worst. Worst. WORST. 5/5. If I could give it a negative score, I would.