"We're known for our Red Velvet cupcakes!"

Are you?  Really?

No fewer than half of the cupcake bakeries I have been to in LA have told me some variation of that sentence.  Now, the thing is, if they're all known for Red Velvet, aren't they all sort of not known for it?

What I mean is, if every bakery has spectacular Red Velvet, they what would bring a customer to one over another?  Nothing but loyalty or curiosity I suppose.  The thing is, as a newcomer to any given bakery, sometimes they fool me into thinking they really do have the best ones.  And then I try them and am inevitably disappointed.

The fact is, Red Velvet cupcakes just aren't all that good (with the exception being the ones at Famous Cupcakes in Beverly Hills, where I got a free sample of one and it really was that good).  They're extremely popular right now, but besides being freakishly red, they're not special.  I think what people like is the cream-cheese frosting (which, I might point out, could be put on any cupcake) and the fact that the things are called "Red Velvet."  Velvet sounds luxurious and sophisticated somehow.  But you know what, it's a cupcake, not fabric.  It is still loaded with [deliciously sweet] sugar and enough calories to count as dinner.  

Don't get me wrong, I've tried to make them a few times, but they always seem not to come out quite right.  Why do I bother?  So come on, cupcake bakeries of LA.  Put your efforts into another flavor, and PLEASE stop telling me you make the best Red Velvet cupcakes because you probably don't.  

The elephant in the room, aka the hair in the food

There are some people whose food I avoid because of the one consistent ingredient: hair.

Oh come on, you know someone like that. Every time they cook you have to politely decline, saying, "Oh, no, I just ate. Thanks though!" or, "Ooooh I wish I could, but I'm on a diet!" Or perhaps you avoid the person altogether when you notice they've brought in a delicious-looking tray of brownies -- that is, delicious if it weren't for the hair lurking inside.

Sometimes, though, you don't realize somebody is one of the hairy folk, and you eat their food. As you're chewing, you get that unmistakable feeling in your mouth. Oh god. A hair. You have several options at this point:

1. Swallow (and don't let the disgust show on your face)
2. Turn your head away as if to look for something and then subtly pull the hair from your mouth
3. Pull it out very obviously right in front of the cook

Option 1 is just gross. So, moving on...

Usually I go with option 2, but then you may be forced to look at the hair and analyze what kind it is. Long silky head hair? Small bit of beard stubble? Dog hair (short or long)? I suppose it could also come from the cook's nether regions, but I don't even want to know how that would come about...

And anyway, let's be honest -- the cook probably knows exactly what you're doing. No matter how subtle you try to be, it's sort of obvious when you stick your fingers in you mouth, then pull them out and examine the saliva/food/hair mixture on them. Everybody knows what's going on, but you quickly wipe your hand on your pants and pretend nothing happened so as not to offend the cook. Why?

Option 3, I think, is greatly underused. Why should we spare the cook's feelings when she did not spare us from munching on her (or her dog's, or her husband's, or her 2-year-old son's) not-so-delectable hair? I say next time you just pull it out, look the cook right in the eyes, and say, "Gross. I just ate hair. Please cook under more sanitary conditions or do not offer me any more food. Thank you."

If only.

Nothing

Interested in food?

Then you should also be interested in hunger. Go to Nothing.org.

I wish I were an athlete

I do not wish this because I particularly care about sports and want to be good at them. I wish this because they need to eat MASSIVE amounts of food because of all the energy they use exercising.

I started thinking about this when I was in the dining hall the other day, and I happened to be next to a football player at the cereal counter. I was amazed to see that he took 3 HEAPING bowls of cereal (Lucky Charms, Corn Flakes, and something I can't remember) compared to my measly normal-sized serving of Lucky Charms. I didn't even really want to eat 3 huge bowls of it; I just wanted to want to eat that much. If I had an appetite 3x as big, I would get to enjoy 3x the food. Awesome.

This was not the first time I noticed how much football players eat. Once I saw a guy with one plate holding 7 chicken breasts and another piled with pasta. I was astonished. I thought he must be sharing it with someone, but then decided against it when I saw him sit next to his anorexic-looking girlfriend. All for him.

So the point is, I would like be an athlete because of all the exercising and all the food. Minus the exercising part.

How to become a baker with an ivy league degree

As I near the end of my four years at college, I, like every other senior, am trying to figure out what I want to do with my life.  Somehow I thought I'd know by now, like these four years were supposed to show me the answer and that I'd still be doing at 50 what I'm going to be doing at 22.  The problem is, I don't know what career I want, and even when I think I do, I change my mind so often that I have mostly stopped fooling myself into believing I know what I want.  (Some sample career choices that I was convinced of for at least 24 hours at one point:  lawyer, teacher, advertiser, publisher, novelist, graphic designer, gynecologist [not sure what I was thinking there], psychologist, and, contradictory to what this blog is all about, nutritionist.) 

My current obsession, as you can see, is baking.  And I think I really could be happy doing that, but it doesn't seem entirely realistic.  Question: why did I go to a damn Ivy League school rather than culinary school?  Answer: because I was told throughout high school that a four-year college was the only route to success.  Also implied was that the degree should be academic, although I now see that my English degree is not quite as useful as I once imagined.

As I was doing my mostly-useless psychology reading a little while ago, I read an article about what really makes people happy.  This psychologist (Csikszentmihalyi -- go ahead, try to pronounce his name) said that it's being in a state of "flow" that makes us happy; that is, being so absorbed in something that we forget everything else, time passes without our knowing, and the experience is intense and satisfactory (check it out, it's pretty cool).  Anyway, the point is that I think I feel flow when I bake and when I blog.  I don't know if it's that they both have to do with food or if I like baking and writing, but at least I've found something I like, right?

So I want to be like Maggie Gyllenhaal in Stranger Than Fiction -- overly educated woman turned baker because she loved bringing people food (this clip says it all, from about minute 1 to minute 3).  Unfortunately, the movie is purely fiction.  Actually owning your own bakery is not just giving away food and baking all day. So where does baking fit into my life, and is there any way for me to make money doing it with no formal training?  Until I figure out the answer, I'll just keep making cupcakes to procrastinate and fatten people up.

A new level of ridiculous

TLC has a new show called Little Chocolatiers. I can't help but notice that:

Cake Boss + Little People, Big World = Little Chocolatiers

Do you think TLC is in on the joke, or are they serious when they come up with stuff like this?

Looking and tasting good

Before I tackle the fudge tomorrow (or potentially cupcakes instead), I really have to figure out this food photography thing. I've been looking at How To pages and tips for beginner photographers (though I think I'm even at an earlier stage than that), and I'm hoping my food will look a little more appetizing in photos. I could blame my 5-year-old Sony Cybershot, but I don't think even the best camera could save me. Apparently I need to set it to macro and adjust the white balance. Hmm. Whatever that means. If it's not so cloudy tomorrow maybe I'll get some decent natural light.

I think food photography is pretty awesome in that you can focus all of your energy on conveying the sugary/creamy/artery-clogging goodness that is a cupcake (or your dessert of choice), but I was disappointed to learn that the food isn't always real (or parts of it aren't). I feel sort of cheated, just like I did when I found out Betty Crocker never existed. Don't show me something that looks so tempting I want to climb into my computer screen to get it and then, come to find out, even the best cook couldn't recreate it because it isn't real. I'll just pretend for now.

Feminism in the kitchen

Since coming to college, I've begun to think of myself as something of a feminist. I'm appropriately outraged when I hear about incidents of sexism and I hate the figurative pat on the head that I sometimes get from men (such as: "Don't worry about it Sweetheart, I'll take care of it"). But as I was reading the first chapter of The Feminine Mystique on Sunday, all I could think about was how much I wanted to be in the kitchen baking something. Imagine my guilt as I read the words, "kitchens were once again the center of women's lives."^* Bad feminist. Bad.

It's not uncommon for me to struggle with my feminist side and my domestic side. I was shopping with my grandmother some time in the past year and found myself staring wide-eyed at all the gadgets that I dream of having in my kitchen some day. She laughed and made some comment along the lines of, "Oh Aubrey, you're so domestic." I'm not exactly sure how I'm supposed to feel about that. Can I want to bake more than I want to do almost anything else and still be a feminist?

Well anyway, I wasn't torn up enough about it not to bake the other day. So I decided to try making cinnamon buns, something I've done before but only with the help of a bread machine. I never realized before how tiring it could be to knead dough.

Things did not start off great. First of all, the recipe told me that the yeast-water-milk mixture should become foamy. It didn't. I panicked but decided to keep going because I was almost out of milk and didn't want to use more. Then as I began kneading the dough, it was waaaaaaay too sticky and got all over my hands. But of course I couldn't just add more flour because I had run out. So my boyfriend kindly went to the mini mart and bought some for me. I got the dough to be the right consistency, kneaded it (very good arm workout), and hoped it would rise. It did! I guess the yeast worked after all.

Everything else went pretty smoothly, and the result...

Okay, so they were kind of odd shapes and sizes, but they tasted good. Anyway, I think I'm going to hold off on baking anything else that involves kneading for a while. Next project: fudge.

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*Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1997. 60. Web.