Each year on the day before Thanksgiving, the office staff throws an informal potluck complete with way too much good food and games before closing shop early and heading home for a long weekend. I’m in charge of the music — mix-CDs (tapes!) of classic R&B and funk to get people relaxed and grooving — and I usually prepare lumpia because I really enjoy torturing enticing my office mates with the smell of all that hot, crispy goodness wafting through the halls while I fry it up fresh in the kitchen. Much to their disappointment I decided to bring dessert this year, but little do they know that I’m giving out small bundles of lumpia with cooking instructions for the holidays. Thankfully, none of them read this site so the surprise is safe with… some several billion other people across the internets. Master of Secrets, I am not.
I’ve been salivating over Ina Garten’s recipe for Carrot Cake Cupcakes for several months, so despite the fact that our potluck table is always, always dessert heavy I thought the lunch would be the perfect excuse to bake. Some key learnings I have taken away from last night’s baking craziness:
1. It’s been so long since I’ve baked that I forgot how I lose interest about halfway through the process.
2. I really shouldn’t have picked a recipe that I hadn’t tested before. I needed to have practiced it a few times so that the first dozen I pulled from the oven didn’t have to be the “test” (read: hockey puck-ish) batch.
3. Don’t inhale the nonstick cooking spray. Really. It’s not worth it.
4. Whining about why cream cheese really needs to be “creamed” will elicit little sympathy from others.
The second batch was more than edible — I got lots of good responses to it — but I was too worn out by it all to even take a picture of the final product. Most days, reheating leftovers or assembling a sandwich is as good as it gets so I like to have proof a picture of my more involved cooking/baking efforts to remember them by.
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