Foodie Dreams, Kitchen Nightmares: Margarita Cupcakes

Foodie Dreams, Kitchen Nightmares chronicles my fail-whale attempts at making foods I love. Tonight, I explain why Mexican booze and fluffy pastries shouldn't mix.

As should be made painfully obvious by now, I have a thing for cupcakes. They are sweet, simple, delicious, and usually cheerfully decorated--a little bit of happiness you can hold in your hand. But also, I like margaritas. They were the first alcoholic drink I ever had, in Bermuda after my mom was all like "Whatever, we're on vacation" some time in my early teens. They so nicely combine the sweetness of the drink with the tangyness of the lemon/lime, the salt on the rim, and the bite of tequila, which otherwise is just disgusting.

And, ok, I get that just because you like two things separately, it doesn't mean you'll like them together (mmm chocolaty bacon...), but when I came across a recipe for margarita cupcakes (!!!), I couldn't resist.


During the summer I was just realizing that I would, in fact, be cooking my own meals for myself for at least the next 60 years, a fact that mostly depressed me as I imagined an endless line of pan-fried chicken and pasta stretching out into the distance. So, to make myself feel better, or at least convince myself that I had cooking skillz, I started searching out recipes in earnest (bringing me to, like, now). And at some point (and somewhere where I've now forgotten), I came across this cupcake recipe. Undaunted by the dozen+ ingredients, which included buttermilk and pureed mango, I forwarded it to Dave with some sort of subject line similar to "OMG OMG HAVE TO BAKE NOWWW!!!!" He agreed, and we decided to wait until Fourth of July, when we would get to take advantage of his parents' amazing kitchen and his mom's amazing cooking skills.

In retrospect, I probably should have realized my cupcake baking skills begin and end with boxes of cake mix. Also, any recipe that specifies what kind of honey they want you to use just has to be asking for it. The frosting--which for some reason we did in two batches--came out either laffy taffy stiff or watercolor thin, and the cupcakes emerged as poor, shrunken shadows of themselves. Also, I'm still lost about the "margarita" part of the margarita cupcake. From my perspective, the only thing margarita-y was the 1/4 cup lime juice and the tequila shots we later had to drink to convince ourselves the cupcakes were good.

Mrs. Toniatti valiantly offered her help and her mixer (and taught me the proper way to use measuring spoons!), and later called the cupcakes delicious and beautiful (where Dave gets it from?), but I'm considering the whole thing kind of a wash. Enough for me to get all Jimmy Buffett on everyone.


MARGARITA CUPCAKES
INGREDIENTS:
2 cups flour
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp sea salt
1/2 cup ripe mango (pureed or very finely chopped)
1 lime (zest and 1/4 cup juice)
1/4 cup buttermilk (or 3 Tbsp plain yogurt and 1 Tbsp milk)
1/2 cup butter (softened)
1/2 cup honey (wildflower preferred)
2 eggs

DIRECTIONS:
Preheat oven to 350.
Mix together dry ingredients and set aside.
Combine mango puree, lime zest and juice,buttermilk,and set aside.
Cream butter, add honey, eggs one at a time.
On low speed,add in half of dry mixture,until combined, half of liquid mix, repeat.
Fill lined muffin tins about half full, bake 18-22 minutes.

FROSTING
INGREDIENTS:
1/2 cup butter, softened
1/2 cup mango (very finely chopped)
l lime (zest and juice)
2 Tbsp honey
4 to 5 cups confectioners sugar
sea salt

DIRECTIONS:
Cream butter. Add mango, lime, honey.
Add sugar 1 cup at a time. Frost cooled cupcakes and sprinkle with sea salt.
(* This makes a very large amount, consider cutting frosting quantity in half)
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Foodie Dreams, Kitchen Nightmares: Los Pastelitos Pobres

While I do have the ability to read a recipe, I'm less qualified to make one up myself. This is especially troubling since the only reason why I would really try to make my own recipe would be if I ate something wonderfully delicious but was unable to find a recipe for it, mostly because it's a restaurant's specialty and they are jealous about handing out trade secrets (except with the Main Street Diner's baked spaghetti pie--those kind souls gladly obliged me). The result is I experiment to typically gruesome effect, turning a beautiful dream into lumps of unappetizing sludge (I guess sludge is always unappetizing...). Example: my terrifying and depressing attempts to recreate the little bundles of joy (not babies) that are pastelitos.

I last wrote about pastelitos in my column on the Border Cafe, the Tex-Mex restaurant that fulfills all my greatest foodie dreams and deepest foodie fantasies. They are so good I would regularly get them for lunch when I was an undergrad, even though it is always a bit weird walking into a bar at 11:30 a.m. One of the saddest things about leaving Cambridge, aside from having to say good-bye to free meals, access to 15.8 million books, and Sundae Sundays, was that I could no longer pop into the Border Cafe for a quick pick-me-up, pastelitos-style.

Luckily, I regularly come to Cambridge to visit Dave and my brother, but all that may be spoiled with Dave's plans to go to grad school, removing me from my bi-monthly excuse to indulge in Border's many splendors (he has some craazy idea about living somewhere else after 6 years. so selfish). Some time ago, foreseeing this unhappy event (if any Harvard/MIT admissions officers read this blog, might I suggest a prime candidate to your esteemed graduate programs in economics?), I decided to attempt to recreate, at home, Border's spicy-salty-tangy pastelitos.

Unfortunately, there is no way I would find online a recipe for pastelitos, seeing as they just mean "little pastries" in Spanish and are most likely a Border original. And my plan to ask for the recipe fell through when I was too embarrassed and Dave ignored my casual requests to ask for me (because I'm never in Cambridge! And his office is right next door! ...Bah). But I figured since I had eaten my body weight in pastelitos over the years, I should be able to recreate at least a passable facsimile. Le sigh.

I started by breaking down the pastelito into its basic parts: very moist, shredded chicken, lightly spiced but clearly marinated in something, wrapped in a slightly salty flaky dough, with chili verde sauce for dipping.

In hindsight, I probably made a few key mistakes. Like poaching the chicken in water, and using fried dinner roll dough for the crust. Also trying to make chili verde with just some cilantro and olive oil. It sounded nice--chicken wrapped in fried dough--and even my roommate (a far, far better chef than me. She has a mortar and pestle! puts me to shame) asked if she could try some. I felt bad about giving it to her, since it tasted mostly like gummy/burnt dough wrapped around tough little wet nuggets. It felt a little like what you would give your dog if you needed to hide a pill in some food, except probably even your dog would be all like, "Bish, plz." I boldly called them "my famous empanadas," at least aware enough that they were to pastelitos what Qterplix is to babies. I was lucky my roommate didn't laugh in my face or, you know, vomit. She's nice.

I suppose someday I could actually just ask the fine people at Border for the recipe and see if they would give it to me. However, I thought, as I scraped bits of stuck dough off my ever-resilient frying pan, there's something about the mystery of the pastelito, like they are some magic Mexican fairy food, that might be lost should I cook it for myself, and perhaps the lesson is that I should allow the pastelitos to remain behind a veil, forever unattainable except in the hallowed mecca of the Border Cafe...

ok but really if i had actually made them would have been sweeeet

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Foodie Dreams, Kitchen Nightmares: Sweet Potato Fries

In this column, I look at my often-disastrous attempts to recreate some of my favorite meals. Today, sweet potato fries, which ended up (figuratively, literally) more fried than sweet.

Generally, I like french fries. My intimate relationship with the Queen's Head Pub's fryer notwithstanding, I enjoy a good fry, which I realize is essentially a flavorless potato stick doused in hot oil and salt (mmm...). I try to limit my fries, though, mostly because it depresses me and fattens me to unabashedly eat so much oil. That's what got me interested in a healthier alternative: sweet potato fries, which, rather than being fried (although I am a whiz at whipping up a home fryer, see: cake, funnel), are baked with their skins (but don't call them sweet potato bakes. that would be weird). Salt is optional, as is brown sugar, which I am in favor of adding to most recipes.

I first had sweet potato fries at b.good, a restaurant that purports to be both a health food place and a burger joint. Every once in a while they have one-day-only specials where they offer things not actually on the menu that are often much, much better than anything else on the menu (like pumpkin smoothies... So. Good.). And the only way you find out about them is if you join b.good's "family," which I think just means going online to the mailing list. Anyway, Dave is a part of the fam and last year, when we actually lived in the same zip code, we would periodically meet for lunch at b.good on days when they had specials. And that, dear reader, is when I came in contact with sweet potato fries.

A word: the b.good sweet potato fries were not especially great, but in their slightly mushy form, they held the promise of greatness. They were sweet (natch) without being cloying and warm and filling without being weighty. I thought they needed a little more snap to them, maybe fewer spices, and could be a little bit bigger, but otherwise, I was happy with this new knowledge. I set off, determined to replicate and improve.

And then I realized I was a poor undergraduate with no kitchen and no budget for sweet potato fancies, and I shelved the idea for a year. Until! Several weeks ago, when I thought it would be a good idea to try it out.

I didn't really find a single recipe that I thought matched the kinds of things I wanted, so I looked at a bunch of recipes and found enough common themes to cobble something together (my Frankenstein recipe below).

My problems were early, frequent, and embarrassing, beginning with my lack of awareness that sweet potatoes and yams are the same thing. Yeah. I know. After spending about 15 minutes staring vacantly at the "roots" section of my grocery, I finally asked someone if they sold sweet potatoes. I figured, since they sold something called yucca, plus a variety of other things that looked like they grew in dirt, sweet potatoes would be right out in the open. Turns out, they were. They were right in front of me, the kind grocer gently pointed out, the way you would if someone asked you if humans were, in fact, bipedal.

"Wait, aren't those yams?" I asked? "Wait, are they the same thing?!?"

I came off about as self-aware as a puppy on a beach ball, but I got my comeuppance when the grocer helped me pick out a few choice specimens before adding, "Looks like rats might have been gnawing on the box so make sure you wash them really well."

I guess it was better for her to tell me, since I then ended up peeling off not just the skin, but a good half inch of potato as well, but I figure it's a bad omen to start of cooking with genuine worries of contracting the Black Plague.

So, I got back to my house with my rodent chew toys (ok, I'll stop. They really looked ok, and I'm still alive, so they were probably fine.), and commenced slicing and dicing. A few weeks back, I'd helped my mom make baked sweet potatoes that were out of this world good--soft, syrupy, pulpy and addictive. While I'm aware that boiling and microwaving probably had something to do with it, I was annoyed at how stiff my potatoes were, and how my less-than-sharp knife, awkward cutting angle, and slippery cutting board (courtesy the three vigorous washes I gave the potatoes) combined to create the kind of situation that came before an amputated finger.

When I did cut them, they looked way too big, meaning I slivered and sliced until I was left with probably 60 fries, rather than the 16-24 the recipe called for. My olive oil, too, gave off the kind of odor that I thought wouldn't mix well with fries, and the salt-sugar-pepper mix ended up mostly on my hands and the pan, not the fries. Undaunted, unaware of the calamity to follow, I stuck the fries into the oven and danced off to watch Family Guy, visions of perfectly crispy, salty-sweet fries dancing in my head.

My first sign that things were going bad came about 15 minutes in, when a smell emerged from the oven that shouted more "Danger! Danger!" than "Bust out the forks and knives." Although the recipe called for at least another 15 minutes of baking, like a runner who breaks an ankle at the starting line, I knew it was over. What I pulled from my oven were about 60 shrunken little sticks that looked slightly orange beneath a blackened crust. To be fair, I did eat one or two of them, and what I tasted, besides my own shame in food form, could on some level be misconstrued as sweet-potato-fry-ish. I saved some of them in a Tupperware container that is still sitting in my fridge, poor thing, but the majority were tossed out while I huddled around my oven, rubbing my hands together and saying "Whyyyy???"

I'm planning to try again this week, because no one likes a quitter (unless you smoke, in which case you're a hero). I'll let you know how it goes...


SWEET POTATO FRIES
INGREDIENTS:
2-3 sweet potatoes
olive oil for coating
1 tablespoon brown sugar
1/2 tablespoon sea salt
1/2 tablespoon cayenne pepper (optional)
1/2 tablespoon black pepper

DIRECTIONS:
Preheat oven to 450 degrees.
Wash, don't peel, potatoes.
Cut in half lengthwise and divide halves into 4 fries.
Mix sugar, salt, cayenne pepper, and black pepper.
Sprinkle mix on potatoes.
Bake, on one side, for 25 minutes.
Flip with spatula and bake for 5-10 minutes.
Remove and sprinkle with more of the mix while still hot.
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Foodie Dreams, Kitchen Nightmares: Molten Cake

Every once in a while I come across a kind of food that makes my little taste buds sing, but for a variety of reasons, I know I'll never be able to get that food ever again. This semi-weekly column, "Foodie Dreams, Kitchen Nightmares," will showcase the foods I've fallen in love with and my (devastatingly disastrous, usually) attempts to recreate them.

On the menu for this evening: Molten Cake.

The one and only time I had this molten cake was at the semi-formal dinner my house master and his wife hosted for outgoing seniors last spring.* Cheryl, of the awesome kitchen and sunny spirit, topped a delicious dinner with heaven in a ramekin, her special molten cake. I'd never had molten cake before and I spent most of the dessert babbling incoherently, drunk on love and chocolate, interrupting the conversation to say again and again, "What is this?" It had the consistency of slightly solidified brownie mix, but sweet, airy, and stop-you-in-your-tracks chocolaty. At the time, I didn't even have my own kitchen, but I foresaw the day when I'd need my own gooey comfort (that sounds gross but I'm really talking about the cake), so I went ahead and asked Cheryl for the recipe.

She said sure, and then "forgot" to give it to me, which led to a campaign of emails and a series of friendly chats, subtly underscored by the rabid gleam in my eye which said, "gimme my molten." Finally, finally! oh sweet day, I had the recipe. It seemed simple enough until I got to the part: "Grease 12 ramekins." Ramekins? Twelve ramekins?? I don't even have 12 spoons. I adapted, which they say can lead to moments of genius but in my case usually just leads to crappy food. I bought 2 ramekins, thinking I could try it for dessert one night and freeze any leftover batter.

It was a disaster from the start. I was out of margarine and used butter, I didn't refrigerate it for the suggested period of time, and I didn't adjust the heat of the oven for the fact that I was cooking 1/6 what the recipe called for. What I eventually pulled out from the oven were two shriveled things that stained my ramekins a dirty brown and resembled less floaty mounds of chocolate than the charred remains of a scorched earth, post-apocalypse. Gamely, my boyfriend tried them and declared them "Just as good as Cheryl's, baby!" proving that while the way to a man's heart may be through the stomach, true love has no taste buds.

Someday, when I have a real kitchen and can afford cookware not gotten from Ikea, Urban Outfitters, or my parents cast-off pile, I'll try molten cake again.

MOLTEN CAKE

INGREDIENTS:
1 and 2/3 cups choc chips
10 Tablespoons margarine
teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon vanilla
8 eggs
3 cups confectioners sugar
1 cup all purpose flour

DIRECTIONS
Melt choc chips and margarine in microwave
Beat eggs, salt and vanilla
Add confectioners sugar
Temper in choc mixture (add a little at a time, and beat well)
Stir in flour by hand with wooden spoon
Heavily grease 12 ramekins
Fill to brim
Refrigerate for 3 hours or longer
Preheat oven to 450
Bake for 13 minutes
To see if ready poke open top of one with sharp knife
Inside should be liquid; outside set
Let sit for 5 minutes before serving.


*House masters are what we call the, usually, married couple who resides in or near one of the houses at my college (Houses = dorms. It's like Harry Potter). They're like the de facto parents of the house, and they typically offer academic and personal guidance, as well as open their homes on a semi-regular basis to offer snacks to weary students. Jay + Cheryl 4eva Read more!