Cupcakes!

After reading Cathy Erway's The Art of Eating In, I was inspired to look up cooking classes in my area. I knew that Williams Sonoma offered various classes, but I had also found various places while working on the cookbooks last year (doing research for a book that never came to fruition).

So I did some googling and found the classes at The Culinary School of the Rockies in Boulder. Lo and behold, they were holding a cupcake class that still had an opening.

Mike and I briefly discussed it and decided that I should go ahead and spend the cash to take the course. After all, one of my biggest complaints out here is the fact that high altitude baking is so difficult. Cupcakes had become my nemesis in the kitchen and I was seriously ready to throw in the cupcake pan and send my cupcake cookbook to my little sister at sea level.

So I was hoping to walk away from this class with a working knowledge of baking adjustments for high altitude. Sadly, it turns out there is no tried and true method that holds for every recipe. It sounds as though it's really trial and error. But, I did come home with a packet of cupcake recipes already adjusted for high altitude and a recommendation for a book that should help with some of the common issues occurring in my kitchen.

And it was fun!

It was a four hour class and we baked seven different kinds of cupcakes. We paired up in teams of two and each made one variation. My team chose a St. Patrick's Day cupcake with Bailey's Irish Cream. There were six recipes, though, and seven teams, so with our instructor's suggestion, we actually made a chocolate raspberry cupcake with raspberry buttercream frosting. And they turned out fantastic. No explosions, no volcanos, no dense hockey pucks. They're cupcakes!

I also came home with at least one of each different cupcake made today, and a ziploc baggie full of my leftover frosting (which is awesome because you really need a stand mixer to make it and I don't have one yet. Holding the hand mixer for the time required to make the meringue and then add all the butter would be exhausting. I'm determined enough to do it at some point, however, until I can get a stand mixer for my kitchen.)

I have to say, this was definitely a fun way to spend a Saturday. Maybe one of these days I can get Mike to attend one of the classes with me.

I'm thinking that the recipes I came home with can be used as a reference for adjusting some of the recipes in the book that I own. And I've already got a variation I want to figure out on my own -- Tres Leches. I've been dying for some!