Thursday, February 17, 2011

Today I ate 24 cupcakes

I kid you not. I mean, ok. I didn’t eat 24 WHOLE cupcakes. But I tried all 24 of them.

I’ve been posting less frequently this week because my new class – Baking Science – doesn’t really afford any amazing photo opps. I am, however, obsessed with it.

Basically, we focus on a different ingredient every day (flour, fat, eggs, etc) and learn about its function in baked goods as well as how using a substitute/replacement will impact that product. We do this by essentially running a test kitchen and making a billion versions of the same pound cake, changing one variable (the element we’re studying that day), examine each one, taste it, make notes, and repeat.

There’s a lot of this:

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And this:

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(That’s buttercream icing, not straight fat, from our fat study yesterday. And the first pic is testing different sugar levels in pound cake from sugar day today).

The best (and worst?) part about this class is that 75% of the things we make are TOTALLY DISGUSTING! As in, I have a bucket hidden under my table to spit things out. Today I ate a cupcake made with 100% stevia that I seriously thought was going to burn a hole through my esophagus. On flour and gluten day, I had a banana muffin made with chickpea flour instead of wheat that tasted like wet grass. It’s great though, because now I know what not to do when I’m trying to devise my own recipes or make substitutions. Baking is such a balancing act and making one tiny mistake can change the whole chemical makeup of your product.

On a more disgusting note, I ate at least five tablespoons of splenda, stevia, splenda-sugar blend, and regular sugar today while trying to study the taste and texture difference between different white sweeteners. Naturally my teacher waited until after I’d gorged myself on chemical powders to let us know that tomorrow’s product identification quiz is canceled.  No big deal… I didn’t need that top layer of the roof of my mouth anyway.

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This photo shows half of the discarded cupcakes that we composted today.  Yeah, there were two more buckets full. PS Those plastic containers come up to my knees.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to indulge in my 24 cupcake-induced sugar crash.

2 comments:

  1. OMG so excited to taste your gluten-free creations!! The ones that don't taste like wet grass, I mean.

    ReplyDelete
  2. @RT

    Yes! You'll have to tell me what your favorites are and I'll work on creating a masterpiece.

    ReplyDelete