2 posts tagged “cooking”

Last night, I made cupcakes. I used a recipe that I've used at least a couple of times before. But, in those instances I halfed the recipe, as I didn't need an arse load of cupcakes. The recipe has always worked fine, and it's the tastiest cake recipe I've found for yellow cupcakes.

So last night, I started to make the ganache frosting first. This is the easiet frosting EVER. Chop up choclate, boil cream, pour cream over chocolate, let it cool for 5 min, whisk until smooth, cool some more, and then whip in the mixer til fluffy and voila! It only took 2 minutes for me to make a big cooking mistake. I turned my back on the cream heating up on the stove, by the time I turned around, there was cream boiling to the top of the pot and I managed to grab it and pour it over the chocolate and get some of it all over the stove. This should have been a warning sign.

So I go about making the cake, it's easy and it takes no time. I start dividing my delicious, fluffy cake batter among the muffin tin, in the oven it goes, and 20 minutes later I should have beautiful yellow cupcakes. I decide to take a peek in the oven about 5 minutes later, and I'm horrified. I put too much batter in the muffin tin, and it has now melted down from the heat and is running over the sides of the pan and pooling in the floor of what had been a very clean oven (it was practically brand new when we moved in). Crap.

There's not much I can do at this point, so I let the mess bake, and take the pan out when the cupcakes are done. After 10 minutes or so, I now must pry them out of the ungreased muffin tin. It's a miracle they look as decent as they do. Ugh. The crumbs still taste okay though. I get them out of the pan without much of a problem, losing only two, which will become sacrificial to make sure everything turned out okay.

Eventually I get the frosting on them, and Cyrus and I taste them, and he's impressed. Whew. At least they taste okay.

I still haven't cleaned the oven.

Of course, I did document most of the disaster. There's a short slideshow here.

We're going to eat dinner a little after 9 tonight. AWESOME.

I've been on vacation all week, and have done roughly the equivalent of nothing. So I should have had plenty of time to make a lasagna. When I got home from running a couple of errands, I decided I could cook AND do some laundry. Easier said than done. It's an apartment, and the laundry facilities are in another part of the building. So I had to hold off doing cooking related things because there was only 5 minutes left on that one load of laundry, blah blah blah.

It's a mushroom lasagna, and if the sauce is any indication, it's going to be super tasty...

UPDATE: Totally worth it. Totally and completely. If you're interested, the recipe is from the September/October 2006 issues of Cook's Illustrated. Here's a couple of photos of the finished product...