Mise En Place

For the first week (at least) of class the instructor kept referring to mise en place and I had no idea what he was talking about. I'm not sure if he explained it and I wasn't paying attention, or more likely he didn't explain it ever and hoped we would just figure it out. He does that. He is a very brief man.

Mise en place for cupcake fail

Mise en place means everything in its place. I have never been great at having everything ready before I start a recipe. I'm not even good at reading all the way through a recipe before I start. I was making cupcakes yesterday morning and I thought I might as well give it a try. Turns out, it is super nice and handy to have everything ready to go. I like it!

Actually I made cupcakes twice this week. The first time I used a new recipe. I'm not sure why. It all went fine and the cupcakes looked great but then they sank when I took them out of the oven. They tasted great but looked terrible. The recipe seemed suspect to begin with, it had tons of sugar and very little flour. And a lot of milk too.

After that fail I went with my go-to cupcake cookbook. It is a vegan cupcake book I got when I made 500 vegan cupcakes for a wedding last summer. I'm not vegan so when I use these recipes for me I use real butter and milk and they turn out fantastic. The hair salon we go to changed ownership, one of the awesome stylists bought it and gave it a make over so to celebrate I wanted to bring cupcakes. Hair-O-Smith is an 80's themed salon and dance studio (and everyone there is totally rad, you should go to there). They made the floor pink and black so I thought I would reflect that in the cupcakes. I made pink and chocolate marble cakes. I didn't taste them but they looked super cute!

 For the frosting I made a simple vanilla bean buttercream. I tried to make pink and black swirls but it was really hard to get a true black. They ended up looking more purple. Oh well. They were well received so I am happy about that.

In other news I cut myself yesterday but on a transformer toy at work. AND, I have my first practical exam next week. I will have a time limit and several knife cuts to perform. I should probably practice this weekend. Anyone have any veggies they need cut up rather small?