Ham Sandwich Indicted!

This weekend I had the privilege of making cupcakes for a friend's birthday party. Having been informed that she was a fan of vanilla cupcakes, I busted out a Bon Appetit recipe that I used last Spring. That recipe, however, is fairly coconut-centric, and I wasn't sure how the party guests would feel about it...coconut seems to be rather polarizing, you either love it, or loathe it. The recipe calls for reduced coconut milk to keep the cupcakes moist and add flavor to the batter and icing, but I felt that the concentrated coconut milk might be too much. Having read about the wonders of mayonnaise as a useful ingredient in keeping baked goods moist and delicious, I thought that maybe I could combine some un-reduced coconut milk and some mayo and get the same effect as using straight, condensed coconut milk. Yes, mayo is well, mayo, and the thought of it in a baked good sounds somewhat bizarre. Turns out, however, mayo is pretty fantastic and keeping your cupcakes from drying ou...

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,...