I was so proud and honored to help with our friend Izabella’s baby shower last weekend. She has been one of my best New York City girlfriends ever since I moved to the East Coast, and from the moment we met at work, years ago, we have rarely been too far apart. I like her. She’s smart, funny and feisty…all the things I respond really well to, and I’m certain she is going to make a great mom. Now let’s just hope I can pull off the responsible uncle part as opposed to the uncle who lets the kids get into the liquor cabinet…
We had been organizing the party for quite sometime and it’s always great when the plan comes together. Brian spent a lot of time getting the games ready and making a beautiful receiving blanket while I was busy in my usual spot monitoring the kitchen stove. Cupcakes were the chosen dessert for the festivities primarily because they can be dressed up or down for a party and people can nibble on them while walking around with a drink in their other hand. Plus, cupcakes are fun.I haven’t made them in quite awhile; in fact I think it’s been about two years since my last batch. I remember making them for my friend James’ 30th birthday party and they were quite a hit. I like presenting them nestled together on stacked cake stands for the feeling of a giant cake. They sit there beautiful and unassuming, waiting for someone to stop by, pick them up and take a bite.
The flavors we chose were simple vanilla and chocolate, but they were dressed up with frosting/glazes made of fresh fruit and confectioner’s sugar. I took blueberries, strawberries and mint (respectively) and distilled them down to their juicy essence…syrup in fact, and then just mixed in the sugar until they made it to the desired consistency. You are looking for a frosting that is sticky and honey-like when you drizzle it. These toppings are very easy to make as long as you have humidity on your side, but unfortunately humidity and I were not getting along so well on Sunday morning. I had to keep adding sugar and testing the glazes out on the “extra” cupcakes before I finally found something that would stay on top of the cupcakes and not just run off the side and down on the tray.
Trial and error is part of the fun, and for some reason I seemed to be all over the map in my baking this weekend. The vanilla cupcakes didn’t want to raise a whole lot, whereas the chocolate cupcakes seemed determine to grow their way out of the pan and take over the kitchen. Recipes are always funny that way. You can have a considerable amount of experience with baking and still have some days go well and others just sort of spin out of control. I suppose that’s life in a nutshell.
The good news is that all things can generally be recovered from with enough patience and a little know how. My only know how this week was to keep adding sugar to the fruit purees until they made an icing strong enough to hide some of the cupcakes blemishes. A good cover-up stick is a gal’s best friend at times and at the end of it all I was happy. The cupcakes looked pretty and festive, tying into Izabella’s bright and cheerful color-scheme for the day, and they tasted pretty darn good too.
I made the vanilla cupcakes with vanilla paste again instead of extract, and the three sticks of butter in their batter didn’t hurt either. They were light like an angel food cake, largely from the whipped egg whites folded into the batter at the last moment. The chocolate cupcakes had a deep, bold flavor from the 1-1/4 cup of cocoa powder they contained. Green mint icing seemed a natural pairing with the chocolate, but all the flavors seemed to mix and mingle like a perfectly orchestrated cocktail party (or baby shower).
It turned out to be a really beautiful day and everyone seemed to have a great time…especially playing the games. People always act like they don’t want to play games at parties, but once you get them going the competitive animal comes out and they want to play more and more. We based some of the games off our friend Andrea’s baby shower, and threw in a few different one’s to spice things up. The clear favorite was the play-dough based game. Everyone had five minutes to sculpt a baby out of play-dough and Izabella had to choose the “best” one. I must say we had some creative and outrageous guests, and the things they came up with weren’t necessarily babies you might find on this planet. Mars perhaps?
The winners of the games were rewarded with small bottles of Polish vodka and chocolates. It seemed only fitting since Izabella grew up in Poland, and many of the shower guests like to have a nice sip of vodka from time to time. There’s certainly nothing wrong with that. Maybe it was the alcohol contributing to the strange shapes of the play-dough babies. Sometimes creative genius can lurk inside a bottle…a baby bottle that is.
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