My name is Suzanne. I'm 35, married, and I'm the mom of four girls. My oldest will be 9 next month, and my baby is 18 months old. I don't work outside my home, but I do have a REALLY good hobby. I bake. Baking is my thing. I almost love the process more than the end product, and I love to get into the kitchen after the girls are in bed and the house is quiet. It's my catharsis, my zen. And if you knew my girls, you'd understand that at the end of a day, I need some damn zen.
I've loved to bake for as long as I can remember.......well, maybe not as long as I can remember, but for a darn long time. When I was a teenager, my friends and I used to get together in my mom's kitchen after school and concoct many, many scary things. The green peanut butter Rice Krispie treats and the anatomically correct Big Bird gingerbread cookies were particular stand-outs. Mom was tolerant of the mess, probably because she figured that even though were making X-rated Big Bird cookies, we could have been doing much worse. Hmm....maybe she was onto something. I wonder if that would be an acceptable alternative sex ed policy? "Hey, kids! Don't have sex or do drugs.....just redirect your teenage inclinations into pornographic Muppet cookies."
*ahem*
When I was in my mid-twenties, I took a cake decorating class at a local shop. Hoo, boy, was THAT an experience! I'll tell you about it some time, but for now let's just say that I learned some things there that had NOTHING to do with frosting. I did learn a few basic techniques that I can still lay down pretty well, but this was a beginners' class, so I didn't learn anything fancy. Oh, but I DO know what a coupler is, and no. It's not what you're thinking. Go make some cookies, will ya?
Okay, moving on.
People who know me know that I have a rule about birthday cakes. And that rule is this: Everyone ought to have a damn cake on their birthday. Honestly, what good is a birthday without cake? Don't bother answering that, I'll just tell you. They're no good at ALL. Cake must be had! So I make cakes. I make them for my family. My extended family. Neighbors. Ex-neighbors. Pretty much whoever needs one can have one, I'm basically happy to have an excuse to bake.
When my daughter, Piper, had her second birthday in 2007, I decided to shake things up a little bit and make birthday CUPCAKES. Now, in early 2007, the whole cupcake extravaganza hadn't really hit. At least, not here in my neck of the woods. I mean, this is Portland. It's a darn cool city, but not always super fast on the trend uptake, so the cupcake-instead-of-cake thing was kind of crazy. Anyway, I totally went all renegade and made S'mores cupcakes. I have some fab pictures of them around here somewhere....hmmm....
This was the beginning of a pretty solid two years of insane cupcake baking.
I baked. And baked. And baked some more. There were days when I baked two or three different batches, complete with frostings and sometimes fillings. I was baking multiple batches a day FOR NO REASON. I made normal cupcakes, fancy cupcakes, semi-exotic cupcakes, and downright kooky cupcakes. There were no holds barred. I loaded my co-workers and neighbors up with sweets, because even though my kids are happy to eat pretty much any sweet on earth, the poor girls were actually asking me to stop. Has that ever happened in the history of the universe?? Kids BEGGING their mother, "PLEASE! No more cupcakes!!!" Totally happened.
So my point, (and I do have one) is that I've been around the block a time or two. I can totally hold my own against big-ass mixers, candy thermometers, infused ganaches and gelatin-stabilized whipped cream fillings. That's what I'm saying. I'm not an expert, I don't pretend to be one, but I am capable in this regard. Maybe not many other regards, but in this one, I'm a-okay.
What I am intending to do with this blog is bake and decorate my way through my copy of Martha Stewart's Cupcakes and show you how MY versions of HER recipes/decorating techniques turn out. I love Martha, and I can pretty much always count on her recipes doing me right. I know they're tested like crazy by her hordes of minions, but the photos of the finished product often look like they came straight from La-La Land.
For example, these lovely Candied-Hazelnut Cupcakes. Seriously? What would happen if *I* made these??
Would they turn out looking like that?? Or would I end up with sticky candy crud all over every surface in my kitchen and tangled in my hair?
Or how about these yummy looking Orange-Vanilla Bean Cupcakes with the candied orange slices on top?
I can handle the candied citrus slices, but I'd like to know *before* I serve them at a party whether that whole thing is going to come off in my face when I try to take a bite. Don't you want to know that? That's what I thought.
We'll see how things go here, but I hope to shed a little practical light on the perfectly staged and expertly created sweets that come out of the depths of the MSLO headquarters. If it's good I'll be so happy to share the news, and if something is too darn hard for normal human beings to create in their home kitchens, you'll be the first to know. Promise.
