Chocolate Chestnut and Banana Nutella Cupcakes!

I managed to carve out some time this weekend to continue with my personal cooking challenge.  A couple of weeks back I made:

Chocolate cupcakes with chestnut buttercream frosting and candied chestnuts on top.

So, the cupcakes for the chocolate cupcakes was amazing, but I wasn't very excited about the candied chestnuts.  I'm not a huge fan of chestnuts anyway.  But the cupcakes themselves were awesome - chocolate coffee!

Then just today I baked:

 Banana cupcakes with nutella buttercream frosting, topped with homemade hazelnut and banana chip praline.

Banana Nutella cupcakes!

OMG, sooooooo good and soooooo easy!  My house smells fantastic!  My lovely neighbor gave me some home made nutella just this week so I knew it was a sign that this was the next recipe to follow.  Make this, make it now!

I'm taking my extra cupcakes to class with me tomorrow!

:)Margaret

I Survived My First Week of Culinary School!

Good news everyone, I still have all my fingers and I didn't burn off any appendages!  Hoorays!

 This is my class! Our amazing instructor, Chef Catherine is in the middle. I borrowed the picture from the SF Cooking School FaceBook.

So, this was my first week of school at the San Francisco Cooking School, and I loved every minute of it.  It was an exhausting and exciting whirlwind of awesome.  I'm happy to report that I have an amazing group of classmates and I'm pumped to get a chance to work with each and every one of them.

On the first day of school I was given my sexy kitchen uniform, my knife kit and my handy-dandy 3-ring binder for keeping all my tips, tricks, and recipes.  I have two kitchen uniforms that include a checkered pair of pants, a double breasted white chef jacket, an apron, and a cute little hat to keep my hair out of your food.  The knife kit is ridiculously awesome, it's a Wusthof kit with 4 beautiful knives, a steel for straitening my blades, and a nice carrying case.  My binder is gigantic which leads me to believe I'm going to have a ton of recipes!

On our very first day everyone made omlettes, which I had never made before.  Omlettes are more complex than I ever would have thought.  There's a lot of wrist work involved that I'd never noticed.  We are to practice getting a "colorless" omlette - no brown spots - because if you can make a colorless omlette you can prepare an omlette anyway someone might want.  I've been practicing at home with my enameled cast iron skillet which is heavy!  I'm going to have arms of steel!

Our class works on projects in teams of 3/4.  So each team makes pretty much the same recipe, and you're working with people to complete your recipe.  My team this week was amazing.  I worked with Jen and Tracy and we worked so well together.  As soon as we received a recipe we delegated and got shit done!

I helped make stock for the first time in my life.  We made chicken stock and vegetable stock.  It's easy!  It just takes forever!  We made soooo much stock, but it's the base for practically everything!  We used our stock to make different root vegetable soups.  Each team made a different root vegetable soup, then we sampled them and combined them to try the various flavors.  We learned about Velouté soups which are pureed or "velvety" soups/sauces.

We clarified a gallon of butter, and went through the various stages of browning and then burning butter so we could watch how the butter changes.

We took a field trip to a restaurant grocery distribute, GreenLeaf.  It was pretty amazing to see their warehouse.  We had a tour with Dennis, who showed us how the produce is delivered and categorized, stored and then packaged to be sent out to restaurants.  It's a huge operation!

 Here's Dennis telling us all about the food storage.

There were just so many wonderful things that we learned this week.

To finish off our week Craig Stoll, of the restaurant Delfina, came in and spoke to our class about how he got started.

I put my new-found knowledge and skills to use this weekend.  I made my own vegetable stock and then used it to make a sweet potato, carrot and ginger soup.  I also made my own béchamel sauce, and made a broccoli, cauliflower and sunchoke gratin.  We're eating like kings at my house!  I also managed to make a batch of the Robicellis cupcakes this weekend to continue on with my personal cooking challenge.

 My awesome sweet potato, carrot and ginger soup, along with an apple, walnut and goat cheese salad.

I'm so excited to see what this next week has in store!

:)Margaret

The Swedish Chef Has Nothin' On Me!

Today was my first day of culinary school at the San Francisco Cooking School!

It was an amazing day! My classmates are great, my instructor is great and I can't wait to go back again tomorrow! (But right now I'm exhausted.)

I'll make sure to write all about my first week this weekend, so stay tuned!

:)M

San Francisco Cooking School

Eeeeeek!  On Monday, January 6th, I start culinary school with the San Francisco Cooking School!  I'm ridiculously excited about it and have been waiting for months for my program to start.  I was accepted back in July but opted not to start until now because Bob and I had so many plans already set up for the Autumn of 2013.  But now the time has come!

My hope is that I will be able to bring you all along on my culinary adventure. 

I will continue to work on my personal cooking challenge, but I'll also be intermittently letting you know what I'm up to at school.

Let the journey begin!!!

:)M

Cupcakes! Gingerbread and Fruitcake

I baked 185 cupcakes yesterday. 161 mini cupcakes and 24 regular sized. It was madness in my kitchen and at the end of the day it looked like my home had been invaded and only the kitchen had been ransacked. Craziness.

I made cupcakes for two different office parties and they were a huge success at both. I made:

Fruitcake Cupcakes- dried apricots and cherries soaked in booze (brandy and rum) in a molasses and ginger cupcake with walnuts. Topped with Rum buttercream salted caramel and more dried cherries.

I also made:

Gingerbread cupcakes- gingerbread cupcakes with a vanilla custard filling, topped with vanilla buttercream, crumbled gingersnaps and short bread cookies and finished with a white chocolate sauce.

Everything was amazing and I've now knocked off two more recipes from the Robicelli cupcake cook book.

:)M

(I wrote this on my phone, please forgive any typing and layout errors.)

My Personal Cooking Challenge

One day, whilst perusing the internets and all the glorious splender that is on the webs I discovered Robicelli's.  To be exact, I was looking around Medium and found some great posts by Allison Robicelli, specifically her write up on jogging.  (Bob and I were joggers for a hot minute, now we are once again sloth-like.)  I discovered I liked all her Medium posts, and immediately started to day dream about us being BFF - I know, super creepy, and yes I promise this post is about food.  After doing my due diligence I discovered that my new girl crush BFF lived in NYC, and she and her husband make amazingly delicious cupcakes!  I also discovered that the Robicellis were writing a cupcake book!  I immediately jumped on Amazon and pre-ordered myself "Robielli's: A Love Story, With Cupcakes: With 50 Decidedly Grown-Up Recipes."

I waited an agonizingly long time to receive my book, and in the mean time I managed to make it out to NYC to actually try a Robicelli's cupcake.  It was worth it.  Delicious.   I had done my research and found a place called Cake Shop that carried the cupcakes and made sure it was the first stop on my list of places to visit. 

 

The Chocolate Cannoli: 

Chocolate cake, cannoli buttercream, cannoli shells, chocolate chips.

Hands down one of the best cupcakes I've ever had, and it made me so excited to receive my new cookbook.  And then finally, it arrived!

I opened the book and was happily surprised to find that it's written colloquially.  It's like Allison and Matt Robicelli are in my kitchen talking to me while baking.  Their tips and tricks, as well as "half assed corner" are delightful and easy to read.  It is hands down the most fun cookbook I own.  I read through the recipes and picked my first cupcake...The Pumpkin Spice Latte.  

 Mini Pumpkin Spice Latte cupcake with my awesome new book.

After my lovely cupcakes came out of the oven I took to the Twitter-verse and shared my first batch with the world, and @Robicellis.  I was quite pleased to discovered that @Robicellis is very active with their Twitter account and happily re-tweeted me.  It was then and there that I decided that I would bake every single recipe from the Robicelli cupcake book.  

So far I have baked:

Chocolate Peanut Butter Pretzel Cupcake - Chocolate coffee cupcake with Peanut Butter Buttercream Frosting, and Chocolate Ganache.

The Noah Cupcake - Apple Cupcake with Goat Cheese Buttercream Frosting, Bourbon Brown Butter Sauce and Candied Bacon.

 

The Betty White Cupcake - Brown Sugar Sour Cream Cupcake with Cheesecake Buttercream Frosting and Lingonberry Jam.

 

The Root Beer Float Cupcake - Chocolate Root Beer Cupcake with Vanilla Buttercream Frosting and a Root Beer Custard filling.

The Liddabit Cupcake - Chocolate Coffee Cupcake with Salted Caramel Marshmallow Buttercream Frosting, topped with Salted Caramel Sauce and Peanuts.

 

Each recipe is broken down into the different components of the cupcake.  At the end of the recipe is a section called "Assembly" which is super helpful because it helps to finish off your cupcake and make it look amazing.  I've also discovered that the recipes work great for making mini cupcakes, which is my preferred size of cupcake.  Each recipe makes two dozen regular cupcakes, and 48 mini cupcakes - just take 5 minutes off the bake time and you're good to go.  I've started making the cupcakes in batches of one full size dozen and two dozen mini cupcakes.

My personal cooking challenge to myself is to bake every single recipe in the book and tweet out the picture.  I've already baked six different flavors and can hardly wait to bake more!  Every few recipes I'll upload my pictures.

Keep your eyes peeled! 

 

 

The Brooklyn Bridge - We walked across it this time!

I just got home from an awesome trip to NYC!  I always love visiting Manhattan and Brooklyn.  Bob and I hit some of our favorite places but also made sure to try out some new places.  I'm working on the food post now, so keep your eyes peeled.

:)M