Red velvet cupcakes

Red Velvet cake is one of those things I have always heard about, but did not taste before last fall at a bridal shower. I consider most cakes over here too sweet, but the one I tried was really good. The idea to make some red velvet cupcakes got stuck in my head and when we had a completely unexpected snow day this week, finally the day to make them had arrived. Now you have to understand how I go about something like this, extensive research and reading is required and one thing was blatantly obvious, everybody has their own personal way to do this cake, with the only common component being a ton of red food coloring being used. That was something I definitely wanted to avoid, food dye, especially red is like poison for kids with ADD. Some of the recipes have nothing to do with red velvet cake, outside of being red that is. Some people just make a red vanilla pound cake, atrocious!

Originally the cake got the red color due to a reaction between buttermilk, vinegar, baking soda and the alkaline dutch process cocoa. Cocoa has changed over the years though. I wonder how they colored this cake in the Waldorf-Astoria in New York, where it was very popular in the Twenties. One recipe I found used red beets, but all the other ingredients seemed not as typical. I decided to go my typical route, an amalgamation of many different recipes, plucking a detail here and there which adhered to my sense of baking. The original frosting is a butter roux - a cooked flour frosting - and not cream cheese frosting - yeah, something new to learn :)


So here it goes, my red velvet cupcake recipe:

Roast a couple of red beets in the oven, peel them and puree them with tart cherry juice. This might also work with jarred beets, in which case you might not need the juice, but I have not tried this.

Mix 2 cups of the red beet puree
1 - 2 teaspoons real vanilla extract
1 cup of buttermilk

Sift together:
1.5 cups organic whole grain pastry flour
1 cup regular organic flour
1 teaspoon of salt
1 teaspoon baking powder
2/3 cup of dutch process cocoa

Cream
1 cup of butter
1.5 cups of sugar and then add
3 eggs, one at a time

and then add alternating from the flour mix and the beet mix until the dough is all mixed.

Combine
2 teaspons balsamic vinegar with
2 teaspoons baking soda
which will fizz like crazy and you feel like a weired scientist.
Mix into the dough

fill 24 cupcake liners and bake in a preheated oven of 350 F for about 20 minutes. Now I am not completely sure about the time, just test it with a wooden skewer.

While the cupcakes cool down, make the roux frosting.

While creaming together
3/4 cup of butter with
1/2 cup of sugar and
some vanilla extract

whisk, while heating on the stove
3/4 cup of milk
a pinch of salt
3 tablespoons of flour until thick.
Let the milk and flour paste cool and then mix it slowly into the creamed butter and sugar. Beat for quite a while until it is very creamy and smooth. Frost the cupcakes or if you make a cake instead, fill it. I had made some chocolate decorations (just pipe melted bitter chocolate on a baking mat and then cool) that I stuck into the frosting. I piped the frosting onto the cupcakes, as I think it just gives a nicer finish that applied with a blade. The frosting will firm up very nicely in the fridge.

Everybody really liked these cupcakes, they were moist, not too sweet and had a wonderful chocolate taste. They were not bright red, more like a red tinged devil's food cake, but they were just the right balance in taste and texture. I will definitely have to make them again, and if we make it to the Waldorf during the next holiday season, I will have to try their red velvet cake.

Defeated

As a friend reminded me last week, it has been close to a year that I have not blogged on this blog. My excuse so far has been that I wanted to finish the last days of my travel blog first and never seem to get around doing so. But that is really just an excuse, though not far fetched, as I am a skilled master of the art of standing in my own way.

But I think the reason I have not written lies much deeper and it struck me this week that the truth is, I feel defeated and I feel so down on me and my life that I feel like there is nothing to write. No, actually, there is a lot to write, but it is all negative and who wants to read that anyway. I advise you to stop reading any further and if you do so, you do at your own risk. But I don’t want to talk things up anymore and hide my feelings and pretend everything is marginally okay. I am being candid.

I have been reading a lot lately, the best diversion there is, escaping into the worlds painted by other people, some very skilled ones and some not so much. But I have not been able to even write a short review of anything I read. I have a graduate degree in literature for crying out loud and I cannot write a few sentences about a book? Quite baffling. I could write a brilliant thesis, but not some f...ing little review? Doubts are creeping in that maybe, possibly I might not be capable of any original thoughts at all? All my life I really just wanted to be a writer and yet I do not write. I am too afraid to fail, too afraid that the assessments of my teachers and professors regarding my talent in writing were somehow misguided.

So here I am not doing anything with my life. I gave up my chosen career of writing for the radio for my own misguided reasons and moved to this country and since then had nothing but great ideas and feeble attempts. I find myself having reached a midlife full of self loathing. I cannot stand living in this seemingly shallow and meaningless suburbia, where we pretend everything is fine when the world is really a catastrophe. Or maybe I really hate even more that my own life is devoid of meaning.

When my children were both denied services at school last spring - after all smart children with handicaps are not worthy of help, they can muddle through well enough and school is only accountable for getting the bottom kids up - it felt like a huge blow. I had to put all my books and papers and research away and just forget about it as much as possible. But somewhere inside me it festered and my anger and resentment cannot be forgotten. The moment of failure to get help for my children has strangely been a pivotal moment for me.

Since having children, my life has mostly consisted of keeping them healthy and functioning as much as possible. Most of my energy have been spent on this. I have read so many books and articles and posts, I have been to workshops and acquired quite some knowledge regarding anything in the direction of Asperger, ADD, Sensory Processing Dysfunction, mood disorders in kids, difficult children, spirited children, fussy children, negative children... you get the drift. I know special education law, I know how to survive a baby that does not stop screaming, a child that can go into respiratory distress any moment... I know I could have done a worse job, I am not sure if I could not have done a better one. For a decade I was a pretty good advocate for my children and the hope to get help and to make things better were enough motivation. Supporting my children and working so hard to make them function well enough brought us to the point that they were denied help. Oh the irony of fate. This little, tiny meeting was enough though to deflate hope and motivation. Since that day, I have not been the same, it is like something inside me broke. I cannot explain why this small detail brought down the whole house of cards. Maybe I was just tired of pushing and holding it up?

I think there is another dimension contributing to the feeling of defeat. My children get to do all the things I always wanted to do and never got to do. Should this not make me feel so happy? Should I not feel some kind of satisfaction? It does not, because my children are not me and when I watch them having these opportunities, it brings back the childhood desperation I felt when being denied exactly those opportunities. My children are not at fault, but their childhood is the catalyst in bringing back to mind mine. I had a lousy childhood, extremely lonely and filled with anxiety. I was a brilliant child with many talents, but without guidance and opportunities, it got all wasted.

And now I feel like I have wasted my life, the light bulb reached the end of its life and burned out. Apparently too late to develop my talents, midlife hormonal upheaval has now also robbed me of my superior intellect. I am scatterbrained and forgetful, seriously, it feels like there is a bad batch of mashed potatoes sludging around where my brain should be. My emotions are on a roller coaster, I can go between laughing hysterically to non-stop crying faster than a raccoon gets to our cat food. Despite my busy social life, I feel incredible lonely and lost. I don’t know what to do, where to turn and how to keep going. I feel defeated. Because isn’t that what defeat is, being devoid of hope and motivation?

I have no reason for self pity and I don't feel any, do not misread my lines, I am rather cross with myself actually. I know there are many people out there who have reason to bitch and moan and complain. Anyway: here it is, this is why I am not writing, because I am living a gray cloud of defeat and despair, trying every single day to pull myself out of the mud like Munchhausen and failing more with each attempt. So here I sit, on a cloudy February afternoon, staring at the button 'PUBLISH POST' I need to click to publish this and I am not sure whether I really want to invite people to share my view into the abyss of my dysfunctional self.

But what the heck, at least I wrote something.