Hello lovely

Rosie is laying beside me in a drug-induced haze, poor girl. She had to go to the vet today and get a dental cleaning and they ended up extracting two of her front teeth. Her smile is actually even cuter now, if you can believe it.

As for me, things have been pretty normal around here. Work has been a little over-the-top stressful but things are about to calm down a bit now that the beginning of the school year is behind us. Speaking of school, PCC classes are starting next week. I'm taking Spanish 101, Women in Art, and Chemistry. I have to actually go to class for Spanish but Art and Chem are both online classes. I had to order this chemistry kit so I could do all of this semester's labs at home. It was so exciting unpacking the box to find all of these beakers and clamps and things, plus a bunch of little vials and baggies of chemicals. I doubt I could get into all that much trouble with the small amounts of chemicals in the kit, but it's still funny(ish) to think about the possibility of my blowing up my kitchen.

I started volunteering at a transitional housing center near my apt last week. I go in once a week and help with their homework club, which means kids bring their homework and I help answer their questions about it. My first time at homework club was so great! I got to explain the FOIL method for simplifying equations and I could totally see the moment when the kids I was helping understood. They learned something because of me...that was a fantastic feeling. I know every time won't be that great but I had a grin on my face all the way home and it really made me think about teaching some more.

I made some more cupcakes this week. I ordered a copy of the Hummingbird Bakery Cookbook last week and when it arrived I couldn't help but make a batch of their vanilla cupcakes with vanilla icing. They use a different method for the cupcake batter. Instead of the usual butter and sugar together, then eggs, then flour and milk, they have you put the butter and all of the dry ingredients together, then eggs and then gradually add the milk at the end. It seemed to work pretty well and the cupcakes were delightfully light and fluffy, so maybe that's the method I will stick with for a while. Here's a pic of the loveliness.


Looks good, right? :)

xo,
C

Oh come on...you're not even trying

Click the picture to enlarge



Hee!

xo,
C

Oh for fuck's sake

I had a crappy, stressful day at work. The best way I have found to deal with days like this is baking, and since everyone else at work was stressed, I figured it might be fun to make something I could bring in and share. So I stopped at the store and got all the ingredients I would need to make cream cheese cupcakes with cream cheese icing. I know, it sounds like a lot of cream cheese but I was hoping it would work anyway. Well. No, no it didn't work. First of all, the batter came out tasting...salty? Really? It's true.

So I added a little more sugar and more vanilla to take the focus away from that one note of saltiness. That seemed to work, and I found myself longing to eat a big spoonful of batter which is how I know it's going to make a good cupcake. Okay, problem solved. On to frosting. Dude, I don't know what planet the person who wrote this recipe was on, but the frosting just tasted like a big bowl of cream cheese. Again, not sweet enough. I ended up almost doubling the amount of sugar in the icing recipe and, again, adding more vanilla to round out the flavor. Perfect! So I'm all thrilled with myself and my flavor-adjusty ways when I realize there is an unwelcome scent in the air: something is burning.

Agh! I threw open the oven door and realized that yes, even my gas oven has hot spots and the cupcakes on the edges were browning way before the ones in the middle. I swapped the two cupcake pans and let them bake a little more, but some of them still got a little too browned on the bottom. I turned them out onto cooling racks (burned my finger...sigh...) and just got out of the kitchen for a while before I started throwing cupcakes against the wall in frustration.

I'm sure some of them will be fine and I'll probably still be able to share them with everybody, but on days like today when nothing works the way it's supposed to, it makes me sad that I can't even count on baking to go my way. Bah.

I took pictures but I am too tired to put them in the right places and such. Dear God let tomorrow be a better day. Seriously.

Update: Can I just say...best...cupcakes...ever. Even the burned ones. Also, I really need to invest in a cupcake carrier.