Wednesday, March 25, 2009

Cupcake foolery

Is foolery in and of itself a word? Hmm, well you'll get my drift I'm sure. I was approached by an acquaintance who wanted to compete in a cupcake competition. Sounded good to me. How could we make it somewhat Essenceish (another nice word I think). She really wanted to incorporate interesting flavor combinations so as to win the creative cupcakae division. Well now she was talking my language. What could we put in a cupcake that really shouldn't be there , but still taste great. Hmmmm. I know curry. How about a curry cupcake. Yikes that sounds like shit doesn't it. Well we now had a starting point. A quicl look to the Food Pairing website gave us all kinds of possible combos to go with. We settled on Sweet potato, curry, apricot and hazelnut (the last three were from the Alinea cookbook). Caitlin managed to make a great sweet potato cupcake, nice airy but still dense and chewy. What could we do with all these disparate ingredients to go totally over the top. We settled on an apricot gel inside the cupcake. Top it with curry cream cheese frosting (I know it sounds strange but trust me). And the final component nutella powder.Some tweaking of the amount of each in the final product and we have........Hopefully a winner
PS. the frosting rocks. Who knew. I will find more uses for it in the future.
We will make the cupcakes for the competition on Saturday, so stay tuned and I'll post some pics.
Jay

2 comments:

lis said...

I loved the cupcakes! Caitlin should have won. Sadly, an irish car bomb cupcake--shaped like a bomb, woo hoo, won.

Jason said...

it was a great tasting cupcake. We had some other ideas about decoration, but ran out of time. ONe problem you encounter when handing people things that aren't as they seem, is shock. THey really need to be eased into it. If she had given a breakdown of the reason for the combo or just explained the flavors, it would have been better for her. As I always say when I get strange looks from "meat and potatos" folk is that Ottawa is the town that fun forgot.