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….

Tired April 11, 2008

Today was a the second of two 8+ hours of straight printing! Yikes, I am beyond tired. Can you tell. I always feel so lucky that I have such a nice home to go to after days like this. Although being at the bottom of those stairs staring upwards and thinking about the 3 other flights I have to climb before I reach my lovely home can feel insurmountable sometimes. The weather tonight felt right considering my mood. It is cold and foggy. I love when there is low fog in the city. It makes it seem like a smaller and quieter place. It has been a hard spring. We had one beautiful day this week, but the chill in the air quickly returned as has the rain as I can hear it bouncing off my air conditioner.

This was an interesting week. Through Facebook I have gotten reconnected with a slew of high school alum! It’s been fun catching up with everyone and to begin planning out 20th!!!!!! reunion. How did that happen? When did that happen? It is hard not to look back over those years and take a measure of what I have done, by comparing to what others have done. I try not to because we all choose to live our lives differently and choose what is important to us. So since we do make these different choices, we really should not feel like we have missed out on certain things because whatever we are doing right now is OUR LIFE and that is good! Don’t say “what have I done in all this time?” instead say, “WOW look at all that I have seen, tasted, cooked, felt, created, traveled to, written, read, sang, painted, and overall experienced since I left those hallways of Friends Seminary!” It is easy to fall into that trap of comparing our lives to others, and I am actively working on not doing that!

Now it is time for bed. Tomorrow is another day of printing and my Mom’s birthday.

Family time. April 7, 2008

My cousin was in town briefly last week much to my delight. She moved out to Arizona about 2 years ago after living in northern New Jersey for all of her life. She was on the east coast to be “in the office” for a few days, so I only really got to see her in the evenings, but that was good enough for me . On Thursday night we were able to get our little family together at Clinton Street Baking Company for a yummy dinner and more importantly dessert and a shared hot buttered rum.

As you can see our family resemblances are astounding! Here is the way it fits together. My mom and my cousin (her niece) are related by blood. Eden is the daughter of my Mom’s sister. My brother (Peter) and I are both adopted. I was born and adopted right here in NYC and my brother was born and adopted in India. (Long before adopting children from another country was like shopping for a fashion accessory)

So together we make up my family. I am always so happy when we all can spend time together.

who loves you kitty!

How much do I love my kitty! So much, I cannot express in words, only pictures!

Tarts March 31, 2008

A sampling of some summery fruit tarts.