Indira The Sweet

Cupcake Cookoff May 18, 2008

Unfortunately, early Saturday while getting my ingredients ready for all the cupcake baking ahead of me, I started to feel ill. All week I had been battling the worst bout of allergies I have ever had. So at first I thought it was just more allergy trouble, but as the day wore on, I just began to feel worse. But I had no choice but to bake on. I just washed my hands even more than I would anyway working in the kitchen.

So after Bahareh and Jelsen left on Sunday, I crashed on my couch and napped the rest of the day. Monday came around and I felt even sicker, but I had committed myself to judging the 2nd annual Cupcake Cook off sponsored by The Brooklyn Kitchen.

Here are just is a VERY small sampling of the 29!!! entries for this competition. The “cook off” was being held at a bar in Williamsburg called Union Pool. The entrants came one by one and set aside 6 off their best for judging and then put out the rest for general consumption for the “popular” vote. I could not believe how many people entered. I had never seen so many varieties of cupcakes. I thought I was over the whole cupcake craze, but after this week, I fell a bit back in love with them. I was on one four judges and thankfully we decided to just taste 7 cupcakes each then re-taste each of our faves. It worked out much better than all four of us trying to taste 29! To be completely honest, there were several ones I REALLY did not want to taste. The other judges were, Nichelle, from the infamous cupcake blog, Cupcakes Take the Cake, comedienne Anne Carr, and Pastor Ann Kansfeld from the Greenpoint Church Food Bank. It was nice to be involved in such a fun event. You can see an expanded view of all the entries on the cupcakes take the cake blog.

Too busy to keep up with this… May 16, 2008

When my friend Jackie created this for me and I wrote my first few postings, I promised myself I would post at leat once a week. Well, I missed a week, and almost 2. Oh no! Well the world hasn’t ended and here I am trying to catch up.

The question is where to start??

Last week I was printing every day. Another big magazine job, love that! And then I ended the week doing some fine art printing. Then the fun began…

Last Saturday I began baking up cupcakes for a tasting on Sunday for a wedding in June. My chef at school would have been proud of my mis en place. That is the practice of measuring all the ingredients BEFORE you start mixing. This helps in assuring that you won’t forget anything, and that everything is ready for you, when you are ready for IT. It is really an important method to keeping yourself organized in the kitchen, especially when you are baking 4 different kinds of cupcakes. When the baking was the done, the real fun started…

Bahareh and Jelsen are getting married in June and have hired me to make their wedding cake, provide a viennese table and a surprise item. So they came over on Sunday and tasted some tasty cakes! When they came thru my door the first thing they did was hand me a beautiful bouquet of flowers from the farmer’s market at Tompkins Square Park. Then they got down to some SERIOUS eating. Red velvet with cream cheese frosting, and raspberry frosting, lemon with vanilla frosting, chocolate with coconut-rum frosting, white with chocolate frosting, the list went on and on…

It seemed to have gone very well, they tasted every taste combination I created plus some they came up with them selves. It was a lot of fun, but I really thought, “wow, I don’t think I will be able to face another cupcake for a while!” Ha, little did I realize what the next week had in store for me. Well, actually I did know, I just didn’t remember at the time of that thought. so we move on to Monday….

May 2, 2008

I was asked to make a big batch of chocolate chip cookies for another office birthday. The unusual request was to incorporate some sugar decorations in the order. When you are using cake, those decorations are easy to apply, but in a cookie, I had to think about that for a minute! While falling asleep the night before delivery I came up with a solution that I thought might work. It required a little assembly on site, not knowing how they were going to present the birthday cookies, I thought my solution would work. Well, they sent me this picture, and it only slightly resembles my idea. THANK GOD! because this looks much more cohesive. They took the pieces I provided and made a nice presentation. I love collaborations! I am glad they enjoyed it all.