Little Kitchen, Big Mess

I had my first paying baking gig in a while last night. 50+ mini cupcakes, chocolate and vanilla. They were for my former law school prof's class on patent and copyright, the focus for this particular class being the issues surrounding the copyrighting of recipes.

Food and the law!!!! What a delightful combination! Someone should start a blog.....

Anyway, after a long day of keeping criminals behind bars, baking some cupcakes would be a welcome reprieve. The vanilla cupcakes were basically the strawberry cupcake recipe from this past summer, sans strawberries. The chocolate ones were a new recipe from the fine folks at Cook's Illustrated. The cake batter itself turned out OK, but I'm a little concerned about it's moisture level--in that there's not enough. It's deeply chocolaty though, which is excellent. The bigger concern I had was the icing--basically processing hot cream with bittersweet chocolate chips in a food processor, then adding some powdered sugar, and pieces of butter. Either my chocolate broke or there was too much butter, b/c the icing that came from the processor was not ultra-rich, dark chocolate icing...it was more, well, for lack of a better word, greasy.

Thankfully, some sour cream, and more powdered sugar helped me rescue the icing, and it actually turned out really well. Unfortunately, my kitchen took a beating while I was trying to resuscitate it:

(What you can't see here is the floor, where I managed to grind bits of chocolate icing into the carpet. Sigh.) What you're looking at is the approximate total amount of counter space I have available to me in my kitchen. My sister's old apartment in New York City and more counter space than I do...and she didn't have room for a full size sofa in her apartment! Thankfully, I do have a decently sized dining table that basically becomes my work station for everything that doesn't require close proximity to the stove, an electrical outlet, or the sink. Oh, suburban McMansion owners--you have no idea how lucky you are with your acres of granite countertops....

Anyway, the Copyright Cupcakes were successfully completed and delivered, and today a group of future lawyers will get to nosh on baked goods during class...They'd better give their prof a good review at the end of the semester!

NB: I realize that my food and the law blog tends to focus mostly on food. It happens. However, the whole idea of copyrighting recipes is something that is of interest to me, and is only become more of an issue as greater numbers of people re/discover cooking. (You have to have been living under a rock not to realize that the food/cooking industry is HUGE business right now.) As soon as I can put some coherent thoughts together, I'll post something about

how I think it all fits together...