A Good Carb

I think I want my money back.

Monkey Bread

This:


plus this:


equals a bit of a stomachache from eating too much.


This wasn't as good when it cooled down -- it was too sugary, even with the ton of cinnamon I put in, and the bottom bits got too soggy with butter. It wasn't going to keep well and I was feeling perhaps too protective of my culinary reputation at work after bringing in the cupcakes, so I ended up chucking what was left. CarbFest is too short for food sadness!

The recipe I used was here, though I think I'd try it with a white bread dough recipe instead of the biscuits if I ever made it again.

CupcakeCamp

The inaugural event of CarbFest '09 ended up being CupcakeCamp. I heard about it just before the deadline and picked a random recipe idea out of my head -- chocolate cupcakes with mocha buttercream frosting. If I'd realized how creative many of the other bakers were, I'd have held out for a better idea, but as it was the cupcakes I made were taaaasty.

I used the recipe here (requires subcription) for the cupcakes and here for the buttercream.

The buttercream was a bit slow to set up, probably because of the MASSIVE AMOUNT OF BUTTER in it (THREE cubes!) but the CupcakeCampers didn't seem to mind. There were easily

over 700 people there -- I overheard an organizer tell one of the people at the door that they'd sold 625 tickets, and this was only an hour in. And they had my coworkers beat in terms of locustlike voraciousness.

Speaking of which, what do you do when you have twice as much buttercream as you can use? Well, first you have a few spoonfulls, feel vaguely ill, and realize you need to find a way to get the leftovers out of the house. But THEN what do you do?

Why, you bake another batch of cupcakes to go under the buttercream and take them to work, of course.

Sample quote from coworkers: "What is this CupcakeCamp and how can we get you to do it more often?"

A Flaw in the Plan

I'm not sure what kind of happy candy-coated version of surgery I imagined before I went under the knife yesterday for my gum graft, but it surely didn't involve quite so many stitches in my mouth, nor did it involve eating soft foods for FIVE TO SEVEN DAYS.

Luckily, pasta is soft. As are monkey bread and cupcakes (because I'll need to do a test run before Cupcake Camp). Still, this requires rethinking.

Why CarbFest?

BECAUSE I CAN.

Well, more specifically, because having my ex around put a big crimp in my cooking, partly because of the way we interacted and partly because a lot of the things I like to cook, he can't or won't eat -- artichokes, squash, sweet potatoes, beets and, as you may have gathered from the title of the blog, simple carbs.

So the ex moves out on Saturday, and I was joking with him that it was going to become one big carbfest around here when he was gone. Then I started thinking about the food projects I wanted to work on -- finding a good pizza crust recipe, baking a loaf of bread or two, maybe even taking on pie crust. And about how baking is actually fairly cheap once you've got the basic ingredients in your pantry, and how I have an army of locusts eager bunch of coworkers who will snarf up anything you put in front of them happily sample a variety of foods, so I don't have to worry about being stuck with more pizza than I can or should eat by myself. And next thing you know, I have a two-week cooking binge planned, I'll be attending Cupcake Camp halfway through, and the closing ceremonies party will include a potato course, a pasta course, a fried dough course and a bread course.

Of course, the next step after THAT is to start a blog about it. So there you go.