Cupcake Heaven

We baked All Hallows' Eve cupcakes today at the old homestead where my niece and nephew now live with their parents, my brother and sister-in-law. Above is my niece Barbara showing off our masterpiece.

It is great when you give someone a present and that person really uses it, you know? I do not have that experience all the time. My sister Katie told me years ago that I get people presents that I would like myself and maybe she is right. And if you do that, your gift could fall flat because you are actually the one who likes it. The other person might not.

Wait till everyone I know gets books about Leonard Pennario for Christmas!

Anyway.

I love Barbara for loving this cupcake cookbook, titled "Cupcake Heaven," I gave her for Christmas. She studies it all the time and when I got to her house she had the book open to Halloween Cupcakes. And this was so cool, in the front of the book I saw all kinds of notes she had made. There were lists of page numbers, and check marks. I do stuff like that. She is like me!

We had no orange frosting but my smart niece knew that red and yellow made orange. We had to seek the advice of my sister-in-law, Natalie, to get just the right shade of orange. Natalie is a crafty artistic person and knows about color. "More yellow," Nat advised. And she was right!

Sprinkles I had found for a buck at Ollie's gave an additional artistic touch.

Barbara sometimes says these wistful things and after lunch, when we were finishing up our project, she said to me, "Why does everything have to end?"

She added, "I wish things could just go on forever and ever."

Man, how often have I thought that same thing! I told her that.

I said, "Barbara, this is one thing I think about heaven, it must be a place where there are no time limits for things that we love."

I think I was imagining Cupcake Heaven!

Our Father

My father died a million years ago but that does not mean I do not celebrate Father's Day. Au contraire! 

We had a new Father today saying our Mass at St. Anthony's. He is from Tanzania and we are very happy to have him. There were many whispers about can we make this permanent and will we have to share him with anyone else. The priest's name is Father Justus, followed by a long African last name that I cannot pronounce let alone spell. So we call him Father Justus.

Father Justus said the Low Mass, not the High Mass as we are used to but it was beautiful in a different way. The Low Mass is kind of cool because there are long periods of time where nobody says anything audibly and if anyone poked his head into the church to check it out, he would think we were all crazy. I enjoy that intense atmosphere. It is most mysterious!

At coffee hour after Mass, everyone was fussing over Father Justus and bringing him the most choice items from the buffet which, we pride ourselves at St. Anthony's on our irresistible food. It was determined that Father Justus liked tea better than coffee and there was a whispered conference among parishioners about how could we not have tea, how could we be so stupid, we have to remember to have tea hereafter.

Meanwhile he was brought chili and a cupcake swirled high with chocolate frosting. Father Justus sat down and blessed himself and said a little prayer and then ate the cupcake slowly, seriously and very neatly. In coming weeks I will have to fill him in on the way our dear departed friend Andy Jones taught us to eat cupcakes. You saw the cupcake in half and then eat it like a sandwich with the frosting in the middle. A very few people are in on that secret but soon Father Justus will be.

It is funny, at the coffee hour I realized I was deciphering not only Father Justus' African accent but also my friend Steve's Croatian accent and, of course, Dorothy's Italian Alpine accent. Father Justus and I did share one sort of emotional moment about that. I said, Father, it is the way it is in the Gospel, people from all tribes and all parts of the world, all speaking the same language, Latin. And he agreed and we had a kind of meeting of the minds.

When he got up from the table Father Justus made the Sign of the Cross again.It was hard for him to leave because nobody wanted to let him go. Next time I will take a picture. I did not want to freak him out by taking his picture today because everyone was jumping all over him.

After that I went to Dorothy's house because she had bought a wheel of Gorgonzola cheese and offered to give me some which was so nice of her. I love going to a church where people buy whole wheels of cheese. But that is another story for another day.

Then I went home and listened to the Monks of Norcia and ate Gorgonzola cheese and drank Bengal Spice tea and did Leonard Pennario editing while the cat napped nearby.

What a perfect day.

A perfect Father's Day!

Alleluia, alleluia, let the holy cupcakes rise

I am in my second childhood and am making cupcakes for Easter.

These were from Martha Stewart February 2009 and  the issue is all blotted with butter and cocoa. When I was frosting them I decided to soar like an eagle and crack out my new cake decorating set from Vidler's. I have always wanted to pipe swirls onto cupcakes!

And it was fun. I think I get the gist of it, how to operate this frosting press. It is kind of like a German Spritz press which we used when I was little, that is to say, in my first childhood.

The only trouble was, the press uses an enormous amount of frosting!

I had made a butter cream out of this cupcake cookbook I have, and I had already doubled the recipe because I sensed that the frosting would not go the distance as written. I piled some into the cake decorator piper thing and right away I could tell that it still would not go the distance.

Sure enough, this frosting that I had doubled swirl-frosted maybe five cupcakes! Then it hit bottom.

I could not see redoubling the butter cream frosting recipe. Already I was feeling guilty over the amount of time this was taking. I am supposed to be writing about a certain concert pianist and not blowing three hours making cupcakes, you know? So I ended up using the knife the way I have before. But my vast collection of sprinkles and jimmies from Albrecht Discount make them look pretty cool anyway.

The process was messy and involved.

But fun!

My niece and nephew are in California and do not know what they are missing. I got to lick all the beaters myself and then the spatula.

By the way, for anyone wondering about the title of the post, it is a riff on my favorite Easter hymn -- well, one of them anyway, "Alleluia, Alleluia, Let the Holy Anthem Rise." After Easter Mass I extracted a promise from our organist that we could sing it sometime over the next couple of weeks. She said in two weeks. For the recessional, the only time at Mass when we sing in English.

So, two weeks from today, 9 a.m., St. Anthony of Padua Church. Downtown Buffalo, behind City Hall. "Alleluia, Alleluia, Let the Holy Anthem Rise." Followed by coffee hour.

I will bake cupcakes!

The Llord's day

Today after church my niece and nephew joined me again to bake more cupcakes.

We did almond cupcakes with lemon frosting. In Barbara's cupcake book, which I gave her for Christmas and she toted over here, we made Amaretto Wedding Cupcakes. We did not make them for a wedding. We made them for ourselves, seeing that St. Valentine's Day is coming up and wedding themes are certainly appropriate.

Prudently earlier this week I had picked up Valentine's Day cupcake liners at CVS. One had red hearts and the other had a red swirl design.

This cupcake book, I don't remember exactly where I found it but it is uncanny because you have most of the ingredients you need. And if you do not have them you can sub something. I did not have Amaretto, and a valid question is why do I not? But I do not. However I did have Llord's Almond Liqueur. Our friend Ari used to bring over bottles of Llord's, which I have faithfully kept. This is one of them.

Three tablespoons of Llord's, a bottle of which is pictured at right, went into these cupcakes.

"That smells good," Barbara said.

It did indeed! And so did the Almond Extract from Albrecht Discount that also went into the cupcakes. And so did the cupcakes when they came out of the oven.

We frosted them with lemon frosting which we tinted pink, and then Barbara and Georgie artistically decorated them with chocolate sauce and pomegranate seeds. Georgie asked if he could have one of the half lemons when we were done squeezing it. I said he could. "Yes!" he shouted. Then he ran around the house with it doing God knows what.

I look at these cupcakes we make and sometimes I cannot believe it. They look homemade, sure, but sometimes in a group they look like something you would pay big bucks for in a bakery.

Also it is good for things to look homemade, you know? It adds to their cachet. I like that about Martha Stewart. Some things, her wedding cakes for example, look polished and impossible to do. But other things, like pies for instance, she likes that homemade look. It is snobby to have something homemade. Most people do not get to enjoy that.

While we worked we listened to Johann Strauss which, here is Pennario playing his own arrangement of the Kaiser Walzer.



It is funny but when we do this, go to Mass and go to church coffee hour and follow that up at my house with a big lunch and a cupcake session, it makes me think of how Sundays must have been to people some years ago. I like to think of Sundays as a day apart. I would like my niece and nephew to grow up thinking of it that way. Not like other days you spend running around shopping and doing errands. On Sunday you may bake cupcakes and listen to Johann Strauss.

Sweet Sunday!