For my birthday this year Sara bought me a Groupon (
www.groupon.com) for a 2 hour cupcake baking class in Williamsburg, which I claimed this past wednesday.
The class was full so we had to work in groups, I was put together with Belinda, who turned out to have grown up in our neighbourhood on Rugby Rd, just a couple of blocks away. It was a bad sign from the beginning when Belinda had to ask if they could wash the measures we were provided, none of us were asked to wash our hands before starting and on our place was a shop bought packet of cake mixture.
The next hour was spent following the simple instructions of adding eggs and water and mixing which I could have done myself at home following the instructions on the back of the packet. What a scam!
At least the icing we made from scratch. We used this weird stuff called 'Crisco' (
http://www.crisco.com/About_Crisco/History.aspx) which is made up from the following ingrediants:
Soybean oil, fully hydrogenated palm oil, partially hydrogenated palm and soybean oils, mono and
diglycerides, tbhq and citric acid (antioxidants)
Well, it tasted pretty good and at the end of the night we could choose any 6 to take home with us. I made sure to get one of the Oreo cupcakes, which is just a vanilla cupcake with an Oreo cookie baked in the middle of the batter. (not as great as it sounds.)
Even though I wouldn't do it again, the evening did inspire me to get baking and recently for a presentation I was doing in work I baked chocolate cupcakes (as added incentive to attend) which received rave reviews and were pretty, pretty good, if I do say so myself.