Mel Bakes. And Stuff.

domain swap

Thu, 22 Dec 2011 23:02:09 -0500

Hello gorgeous people,

the baking blog has been swapped to Blogger at the following address:

balzbakes.blogspot.com

and it’s getting updated regularly for Christmas!

Subscribe <3

Adding a few Sprinkles to my spring break.

Sun, 13 Mar 2011 03:31:38 -0400

Spring break has come and gone. For the first time in my life, I ventured west of the Mississippi River to spend the week with my older brother in Los Angeles, California. Leaving the snowy upstate and exchanging it for 77 degrees and sunny for an entire week (wearing shorts in March? Excuse me!?) was absolute heaven. Reading (in the sun), drinking coffee (in the sun), sleeping (in the sun?), and of course, eating cupcakes (in the sun). I really only had one place I was determined to go before I left: Sprinkles Cupcakes. I had to do it. More than Disney, more than Universal, more than possibly my brother himself, I had to go to Beverly Hills and eat cupcakes from Sprinkles. It was my mission. And I made it!

A lot of cupcake shops that I visit I’m sure, at one point, had amazing cupcakes. However, a lot of places sacrifice quality when demand increases tenfold. I was really happy that this was not the case with Sprinkles. I initially bought their red velvet cupcake and paired it with a glass of skim milk (they sell coffee and milk. I love that). They handed me a little wooden fork and I was set. Not too dry. Good frosting ratio. The cake wasn’t too crumbly. Solid. I have to admit I did bite into that little fondant circle thing first and I almost chipped a tooth but other than that it was taaaasty. Like some other cupcake places I’ve been to, they do not cover their cupcakes, but rather keep the place air conditioned and ask patrons to leave the door shut. I guess they actually enforce the door rule because the cakes did not dry out in the air. They also bake in small batches throughout the day which is very important as well. I should have known that the world’s first cupcake place would never sacrifice it’s quality (I guess now that the founder is a judge on Cupcake Wars, she has to be extra careful. A pissed off loser could pull a “WELL YOUR CUPCAKES AREN’T THAT GREAT ANYMORE ANYWAY” and that would just suck). There was no crazy line out the door either, like with some other cupcake places I’ve been to. I suppose it’s been around for so long that the L.A cupcake craze has died down a bit.

Before I left the shop I brought home their seasonal for St. Patty’s day BAILEYS cupcake, which is a dark chocolate cupcake and Bailey’s buttercream frosting. I had a feeling my brother would love it. I was totally right.

(He ate it before I could take a picture. Whoops. It had a fondant shamrock on it. Omnom.)

Je ne parle pas français. Sérieusement.

Sat, 08 Jan 2011 22:51:59 -0500

During my semester abroad, my mother swallowed her paralyzing fear of air travel, and with rosary beads firm in hand, she flew across the Atlantic to join me for a few days in Paris over my fall break. The two of us had a fabulous time exploring the city, just us girls. We didn’t even need the beads to get up the Eiffel Tower (670 steps- did I mention our mutual crazy fear of heights?). We were evacuated from the Louvre via fire alarm, reminiscent of the family trip to Boston when I was 8. We ate brie and fruit and baguettes as we road on a boat going down the Seine. We stopped in at Laudree for high tea and ispahan and ate the best crepes I’ve ever had in my entire life.

I came home with the best 20th birthday present in the world. I spied it in a bookstore when I was looking for a French copy of The Phantom of the Opera-

I stood it front of the stack of books for like fifteen minutes, just holding this thing. My choice confused the hell out of my mom….because it’s in French. I don’t know any French. Like, at all. 0. But I figured me and a dictionary and Rosetta Stone French Level 1 can solve anything this book can throw at me.

I already spent a day slaving away in an attempt to make coffee flavored macarons. Problems?

1) I have never used a recipe that measured by weight instead of volume, and the closest thing I had to a food scale was this old school thing of my grandmothers that I dug out of our basement that I’m pretty sure was designed to measure much heavier items than flour and sugar.

2) I do not own a sugar/candy thermometer, so I just had to eyeball the sugar syrup process too.

3) I was translating a recipe from French into English and converting Celsius into Fahrenheit. I can only set my ovens temperature in five degree intervals, and when making something as finicky as macarons, five degrees make a lot of difference.

I did actually overcook the sugar syrup the first time, and I didn’t let the macarons sit at all before I put them in the oven. They came out slightly cracked, full of air pockets, and with no feet. BAH.

….the filling tasted amazing?

I always forget to take snapshots while I’m cooking, but honestly I don’t know if I have the heart to post pictures of my disasters, heh.

Now I’m in crazy macaron research mode, but I’m leaving for college tomorrow, so I don’t know when I’m going to be able to do them again. I’ll keep taking notes.

College is the realm of cookies and brownies and cupcakes and happiness. More soon!

Christmas Contraband

Thu, 06 Jan 2011 00:34:00 -0500

I didn’t ask for anything for Christmas this year. I figured the semester abroad was a gift enough, but my mother took the lack of a list as an excuse to get creative. To Google!

In addition to the 8-cup pyrex with the lid (simple, I know, but it’s a piece of bakeware that I have been lusting after for ages), I got a set of M-Cups.

M-Cups. Sounds a sex toy, right? Not so much.

But I have to say, whoever invented these either had too much time on their hands, or is a genius.

M-Cups are just measuring cups. But they are the cutest effing measuring cups on the face of the planet. M for measuring…and M for Matryoshka!!!

AREN’T THEY SO DAMN CUTE!?!?!?!? The company Fred sells these absolutely charming Russian Doll measuring cups. According to all reviews that are as functional and accurate as they are adorable.

Love. Lovelove. They will absolutely be put to good use.

Wed, 05 Jan 2011 23:48:00 -0500

Along with this shirt, the webcomic the quotation comes from is amazing.

New Years Resolutions

Wed, 05 Jan 2011 23:46:00 -0500

Greetings, internet. Remember how I said that I was going to use this blog while I was away to write about delicious things that I ate while I was studying abroad?

Right. Sorry about that. It is my new years resolution to keep this blog updated.

Londontown was the busiest/craziest/most intense/scariest/wonderful 3.5 months of my life. I didn’t do as much baking as I’d like but I got at least 2 good baking sessions in there.

1) Impromptu banana bread without measuring implements or all of the ingredients in a 9 inch round pie pan. By some divine miracle, it was actually fantastic.

2) Red velvet cupcakes for a birthday party. This is where I learned that UK cupcake papers are a LOT smaller than American cupcake papers, and that my flat’s oven really was as janky as it looked.

I did eat some brilliant baked goods.

95% of them were at this cafe: Yumchaa.co.uk

With three locations in the UK, YumChaa prides itself on offering a zillion (and by that I mean approx. 20) looseleaf teas to its patrons in a cute, comfortable environment. You go for the tea, but this is not to say that their pastries were not delicious, because they certainly were. YumChaa was one of the popular hangouts for my classmates during breaks, and I think I had each of their pastries at least once. They offered everything from macaroons to sandwiches to muffins in several flavours. Their chocolate walnut brownie is, to this day, the greatest brownie I have ever eaten ever in my entire life.

Also, if you’re ever in the area (down Parkway in Camden Town), stop in for a cup of their Chilli Chilli Bang Bang red tea :)

I’m also pretty sure I have pictures of this place. When I find them they are going up. They are going up.

Cheerio!

Thu, 02 Sep 2010 15:59:40 -0400

Tonight I board a trans-continental flight to begin my semester if jolly old England. I do hope to do some baking, and I’ll see if I can get in a post about dealing with new altitudes and the metric system (which should be interesting for me). But what I think I will mostly use this blog for while I’m away is writing about the tasty treats I consume while I’m over there. It should be a fantastic time.

Veganism is hard. Literally.

Tue, 24 Aug 2010 05:37:00 -0400

I want to preface my rant with that while I am not a vegan myself, I am not opposed to the idea of veganism in any way. As an ex-vegetarian (I was a vegetarian for almost 10 years but was forced to stop due to a health condition) I understand the ideas behind it, whether it be a love of animals, a desire to protect the environment, sustainability, etc. For me, the idea of veganism comes as part of a desire for a healthier lifestyle (while not the impetus for giving up meat/dairy for some, it might be for others, and it certainly would be for me if I ever were to become a vegan (never) ). In my book, part of a healthy lifestyle also involves organic cooking and cutting man-made products out of one’s diet (GMOs, hydrogenated oils, stuff like that).

I’m not opposed to vegan baking. That being said, I refuse to replace butter with margarine or some kind of hydrogenated oil. They’re both bad for me.

I’ve been on a quest for quite some time (inspired by a vegan roommate in college) to create a vegan buttercream frosting without the use of butter. I watched the pilot of Food Network’s Cupcake Wars and saw chef Chloe Coscarelli making BEAUTIFUL looking vegan cupcakes. I thought “hey, I can do that!” so I looked up her blog and got to work.

Her recipe called for coconut oil instead of butter. The first time I read this I thought to myself, I don’t have coconut oil, but I have canola. I’ll try that. Mistake. The water and oil in the recipe separated out and the frosting turned into a gooey, disgusting mess. I began to further research coconut oil and my mother and I discovered something. Expeller pressed coconut oil is a solid. Oops. So a trip to whole foods later I have the jar of coconut oil (which has a beautiful consistency much like a soft margarine) in hand and I’m ready to begin again!

….the same problem. The water and oil separate and it looks absolutely disgusting. The frosting meets the garbage. What am I doing wrong? DAMN VEGANS AND THEY’RE IMPOSSIBLE FROSTINGS. ….Then I notice a small detail in Chloe’s recipe that I overlooked.

Hydrogenated Coconut Oil.

Hydrogenated coconut oil is full of all kinds of manmade chemicals that contain the emulsifiers that keep the oil and water from separating.

I’m not satisfied with this. I want to make my frosting as natural as possible, without hydrogenated oils. What can I use to bind my frosting? I had a jar of apple jelly (which doesn’t really taste a darn thing like apples) and threw in a tablespoon. It seemed to do the trick! It didn’t completely separate! I frosted the cupcakes with a little difficulty, as the frosting still didn’t have quite the creamy consistency I was going for. I frosted them and set them covered on the counter and went out for the evening.

When I came back…the frosting was hard as a damn rock. A ROCK. After just a couple hours of sitting! TOTALLY unappetizing. It can’t be this impossible. I’m currently in the process of researching natural emulsifiers (honey(agave) seem like things worth trying as a natural binding agent, or some pectin, but I’m still looking) I’m determined to make this work with the unrefined oil. Suggestions?

Earlier this summer a friend of mine requested that I try my...

Mon, 23 Aug 2010 02:30:31 -0400

Earlier this summer a friend of mine requested that I try my hand at a red wine cupcake. This was the result. I coupled the cake with a light cream cheese frosting and dark chocolate drizzle. They tasted quite good, but all my mother kept saying (and any time this cupcake comes up in conversation, she feels the need to point it out again) “well they don’t taste like red wine!!” No, you don’t bite into it and go, “oh hey I feel like I’m holding a glass of pinot right now,” but they have a very distinct flavor and have a great kick together with the cream cheese. Om nom.

(Note: I am NOT a food photographer, I know. Sorry!)

Timing.

Mon, 23 Aug 2010 02:24:27 -0400

I’ve been wanting to start up a baking blog for some time now. I figured the summertime was as a good a time as any to begin, but of course I wait until two weeks before my semester abroad in London to begin. Of course. What perfect timing!

This is what I figure, I record my baking adventures (which, most of the time involves cupcakes, but I do occasionally change it up a bit) from now until I leave and then while I’m gone, use this blog to explore the confectionery goodness I encounter across the pond. Good? Good.

Also, hi. My name is Mel. Nice to meet you.