As a senior in high school, I spent most of my time watching television and putting off homework assignments that did not seem nearly as pressing as they had a year before. I had sent off my college applications and found myself with lots of free time despite several AP courses and unfinished art projects. I had developed a bad case of senioritis, and it wasn't going away anytime soon.
Sometime last September I found myself in the kitchen with a box of cake mix and paper tin liners on the eve of a beloved friends birthday. With a few eggs, oil and water- VOILA!- I had made 24 beautiful yellow cupcakes. The icing too came out of a box (or can? or do you call those plastic things jars?), but that didn't stop the compliments from rolling in the next day as I presented my friend with her 18th birthday present. In the course of the following months, several dozen more cupcakes were baked, as well as a few batches of cookies here and there. By Christmas, I had become a full-fledged baker.
Once my senioritis took serious hold in the spring, the baking began in earnest. Birthdays, an art show opening, graduation party, beach trip... everything seemed to be an occasion to bake and I just couldn't resist the temptation to pull out the muffin tins in times like those. For Christmas I had asked for and received a Martha Stewart cupcake cookbook and flipped through it regularly. For my 18th birthday I got a copy of Cook's Illustrated Baking Illustrated. I looked up recipes online and drooled over the Food Network's "Ace of Cakes" and "Cupcake Wars" (another favorite is TLC's "Cake Boss"). When I arrived at college a few weeks ago, instead of doing homework I would skim baking blogs until it was suggested to me by my boyfriend (who put up with many a long pause in our phone conversations as I trying to determine if I wanted to add a certain blog to my "favorites") that I start my own. Why not?
This blog is not only about my adventures in baking, but my many many mishaps with food as well. As the title suggests, I am not the most graceful person in the world and that will become quickly apparent. I make messes. I make gross looking cupcakes-things. I cook inedible food. I get hurt in the strangest ways (knives are surprisingly hardly ever involved in my kitchen related injuries). I tend to crack eggs all over the counter. I have burnt cupcakes to a crisp. I have cried. I have laughed. Mostly, I've just had fun. Enjoy.
