Case Study 43: "The Bright Young Thing"

“Masked parties, savage parties, Victorian parties, Greek parties, Russian parties, circus parties, parties where one had to dress as somebody else, almost naked parties in St. John’s Wood, parties in flats and studios and houses and ships and hotels and nightclubs, in windmills and swimming baths ..." -Evelyn Waugh 

The "Bright Young People" were an elite and flamboyant circle of twenty-somethings in the late 1920's and early 30's London.  Glamorous, campy, and gin-soaked at best, they ran the English roads, with hopes of bringing a bit of senseless fun back into their depressing post-war world one costume party at a time. Cecil Beaton and Waugh aside, they were not an overly influential bunch.  But these tabloid runners were simply determined to enjoy themselves, and to do it in decadence.

 

Photo by Wendy Bevan from Italian Marie Claire, November 2009   

As new years promise new opportunities, these opportunities beget nothing but brilliance, creativity, and spontaneity.  Taking cue from this other generation unbalanced by economic catastrophe, I propose that we live a little more lightly; frivolous not in our intentions, but in our dispositions. I propose that we hold more frequent and impromptu celebrations, because every day deserves to be rewarded. And I propose that our adventures be constant and unending.

 

"The Bright Young Thing" is a vanilla cupcake crowned by a swiss meringue buttercream frosting.  Pouffed by divine pane degli angeli leveners, it is light and airy, whipped and sweet, and simply mahvelous.

 Photo by Wendy Bevan from Italian Marie Claire, November 2009

A member of the Bright Young circle said in the 1939 play “After the Dance”:  “Whatever people may have said about us when we were young, they could have never said we were bores.”     

Let the festivities commence. 

Case Study 42: "The Resolution"

I have a confession to make: I am not great at making resolutions.  I actually can't remember a single one.

Either I'm more of a Lent-keeping kind of girl, or I've simply always believed that every tomorrow promises a fresh start- to hit the gym, to not meals out of cookies and champagne, to read more, or to do whatever it is people typically promise to do.  Better yet, I've never looked back on any year, as wild, as imperfect, and as unpredictable as it could be, and shaken my head, thinking that I could have lived it differently.  2009 was a perfect example of that, and this New Years' Eve, I resolve to not live the next year any other way.  

It was a year that spanned the charts.  A year full of surprising and awe-inducing love, changes and sudden losses, and new life.  A year in which transitions of wandering and searching were trimmed with sojourns of reflection and closure, and I discovered inspiration in the most lovely and unusual places. 

"The Resolution" is an orange and vanilla creamsicle cupcake with champagne cream filling and vanilla bean buttercream on top.  It's sweet and fresh, and rings in the new year with metallic dust and glitter flakes.  Sparkling and golden, it shines in reflection of the past and is aflame with hope for what is to come.

I guess I've always viewed life less like a pie, and more like a french gâteau.  What I mean is that on this last good day of the year, I am filled with nothing but gratefulness for the experiences and people who have added layers to my mille-feuille of a life.  Seeing it from both sides now, my future will always grow stronger because of them. 

2009 was a perfectly imperfect year, and though you might never know it, I couldn't have done it without you.

Case Study 41: "The Marron di Natale"

"Chestnuts roasting on an open fire..."

 

...And so begins my most beloved Christmas carol.  The dishes have been cleared, the fire softly burns to embers, and full bellies turn in, seeking golden slumber salvation after infinite courses of holiday celebration. But lit by the soft glow of the Christmas Eve light, and snuggled somewhere between grandma's struffoli and anisette biscotti, lies the true scent of an Italian Christmas, waiting for Christmas Day.

"The Marron di Natale" is a chocolate cupcake filled with fresh chestnut cream, and topped with a Frangelico buttercream.  It is then drizzled in a chocolate glaze and crowned by hazelnuts and gold dust.  It is rich and earthy, nutty and creamy, and most definitely fit for a king.

It's not about the gift-tag rush, the bows and paper, or what fills the the stockings that really makes this the season to be merry.  These flavors, the abundance, the familial celebration...well that is what Christmas will always mean to me.    

Wherever you find yourself this Christmas and holiday season, wishing the best to you and yours from the kitchen of the Cupcaketologist.

Case Study 40: "The Frozen Moon"

"It's dreamy weather we're on
You waved your crooked wand
Along an icy pond with a frozen moon
A murder of silhouette crows I saw
And the tears on my face
And the skates on the pond
They spell Alice."

-Tom Waits

They say a picture's worth a thousand words.  Memory is bland without a sense of smell. But for me, there is no sense stronger than sound.  

Sound spurs a mood, creates a moment, and inspires creativity.  I still own nearly every mixtape, cd, playlist I've ever made, and there must be hundreds.  Because these veritable life diaries hold a power, beyond sight or smell, to take me back somewhere.

"The Frozen Moon" is a vanilla cupcake with frosty blue vanilla buttercream. Simple at it's best, it is topped with traces of snow sprinkles and evokes the enchanting cold stillness of winter.

Senior year of High School. I'm ready to graduate, and it's more than evident by the miles I've put on my Jeep. December and an early college acceptance roll by, and I hit the back-roads, where the air is crisp and my car knows just where to go.  My cds all begin with the same dreamy song by Air, and have titles like "Driving Around with the Moonroof Open on a Cold Night." But there was one song that captured what I was searching for: "Alice" by Tom Waits.  

Sounds, subtle yet powerful, set the scene. A metronome of tick-tocking piano notes hold visions of lustful clock-watching. It's brooding, the horns are haunting, and his voice is full of smoke.  My destination is certainly not a place, but an emotion as lyrics speaks of icy ponds, dark silhouettes, and forbidden love.  So I drive on, up Route 57 and past the snow-filled fields and motionless tree skeletons that hang against a frozen moon.

Since words just won't do it justice, I'll let Tom tell the rest...

Case Study 39: "Untitled (The Nightmare Before Christmas)"

"The moon that hung over the new-fallen snow
Cast an eerie pall over the city below,
And Santa Claus's laughter now sounded like groans,
And the jingling bells like chattering bones..."

Every year, around this time, I go into production. My house becomes a veritable mess, filled with sugars, yarns, glitter and flannels, serving as a sort of secret fortress of kitsch in which I am driven bring the ideas that enter my mind to life.  Tim Burton once said "one person's craziness is another person's reality," a mere afterthought for a sort of mad scientist who makes doodled imagination-gone-wild come to life.  A daydreaming boy of tragic toys turned dissatisfied Disney animator, Burton took to the pen, the brush, and the camera to make his inspired and satirical views a reality.  Extramarital affairs with machines and crustaceans spawned Robot and Oyster boys; a Voodoo girl was fated for loneliness less each heartbreak puncture her core deeper.  And a forelorn skeleton, seeing the light on the other side, haphazardly tried to bring a little Christmas heart to spooks of Halloweentown.    

"Untitled (The Nightmare Before Christmas)" is a red velvet cupcake with cream cheese buttercream and twisted black buttercream swirls.  Dreamed up, sketched out, and Burtonesque at its best, it's jagged, imperfect, and topped with madness.

It's Christmas Eve, 1994. After hours of "seven fish"-feasting , fireside tumbling, and spritzer cookie sneaking, my cousins returned home to their own sleepy little Connecticut town.  We'd creep into our rooms and turn down our beds to reveal mysterious new flannel sheets.  Tucking in, the candles in our windows still sparkled behind the blinds, blinking a sort of morse code to the North Pole that this house was indeed a worthy stop. 

But sleeping never lasted long. I would spring awake, at 2 or 3 am, engulfed by darkness, to noises on the rooftop.  I was instantly scared, certain that amidst the snow drifts were Santa's reindeer parallel parking above my head, yet intrigued by a potential sighting of the man in red himself. But weary in my 10-year old bones, I faded back to sleep before giving it an afterthought.  

Though I'll never know who it really was caught in those icy swirls above, I can only trust that as the mysticism of Christmas whirled around me, my imagination around the holiday ran savage.  With craziness as my reality, the season will always inspire me to pull from my twisted dreams and create.  After all, a Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good fright...

To be inspired yourself, check out Tim Burton's retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art until April 26, 2009 in New York City.

Case Study 38: "The Royal Tannenbaum"

"Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village, though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow."

-Robert Frost

For me, the Christmas season never kicked off with pre-Thanksgiving radio repeats or the mingling of Halloween candies with the candy canes in the drugstore aisles. No, for me it always began with a car trip.  We'd bundle up in flannels and down jackets, as Christmases were colder then, and stock the trunk with twine and bungees, an extra saw, and a pocketful of profanities.  After warming our hands by the barrel fires, we'd grab hot ciders for the journey, and set out to farm, with the most glorious un-Charlie Brown fir as our harvest's hope.

"The Royal Tannenbaum" is a light chocolate cupcake with peppermint buttercream branches and pines. Decked out with the finest silver dragées and fresh snowflakes all best trees deserve, it is crowned by a glorious sugar cookie star.

Running past those boring balsams, we'd dash further across the scotch pines, and after hundreds of thousands of kid-measured miles, in the deep heart of the seemingly abandoned woods, we'd find it.   Our royal tannenbaum.  We'd measure it against my brother's ever-changing height, lay down the blanket, and saw. And saw. And after slinging those reserved profanities, and sawing some more, with one glorious crack it would be ours.

Ours to drag back to the car as the sun started to fade into what I  was certain could be Aurora Borealis.  Ours to dig our fingers into, keeping safe grips on our precious catch, as the cold winter's air snuck in the open car window. And ours to bring the first sign of those lovely dark and deep winter Christmas woods into our home.

What's been cooking in Cupcaketology besides confections...

We interrupt this cupcakecast to report that life catches up with you sometimes.

A transatlantic trip, letting go of a loved one, a tennis tournament and a full-fledged arms-flailing launch into holiday season has had the Cupcaketologist running head first away from November.

Luckily, time passes, months end, and the most wonderful time of the year arrives. Just wanted to let you know that besides cupcakes, something sassy's been brewing in the Cupcaketologist's kitchen.

By demand, I set up a little shop on Etsy to feature the tartan knit stoles ("Tartan Hugs" as they've been deemed!) that I've been furiously whipping up in the past weeks.  In true swinging Betty Draper-style, the handmade stoles are reversible (knit on one side, plaid on the other), faux fur trimmed, custom made to order...  and oh so warm! 

Tartan Hugs by the Cupcaketologist

We will resume normal cupcaking operations this weekend... 

Case Study 37: "The David Bowie"

"Don't let me hear you say life's taking you nowhere, angel. Come get up my baby.  Look at that sky, life's begun, nights are warm and the days are young." - David Bowie

Ziggy Stardust Bowie.  Labyrinth Bowie.  Freaky dream Bowie.   Heteropoda DavidBowie. A man of innovation, sheer glamour, and reinvention, Bowie reminded us to dream, while never losing sight of who we really were.  
 
"The David Bowie" is a fun-kyfetti vanilla cupcake filled with jimmies and topped flaming red vanilla buttercream, glam rocks, stardust and a spider from Mars. Half imagination, half bizarre, it's a cake oddity of Bowie mysticism in a Weird and Gilly confection.

This Halloween, I'll don my best silver lame', Aladdin Sane face, and whip out air guitar windmill riffs.  Like a cat from Japan, I'll rebel rebel and find modern love.  And I'll do it like Bowie did best...with striking visuals and in search of my very own golden years.

Case Study 36: "The Impassioned Pistachio"

I'm finally going back to Italy.

Last week, I found a mixtape I made from four years ago, before I arrived at the airport, bound for a year on the boot. I popped it in, and got to thinking about the twenty year-old me.

Life in Italy brought isolation. Two weeks to find an apartment with two years of worthless classroom Italian made for quite the search. It also brought adventure. I rode through the cobbled streets in the backseat of Fiats faster that I ever imagined, and made eyes at the my local bar's handsome cameriere, prosecco in hand by candlelight and listening to Tolga Trio play Django Reinhardt's classics.  I was full of dreams more colorful than the frescoed ceilings in my Via Zamboni classrooms, and I swear I once reached nirvana on a warm black stone beach in the Aeolian Islands.  I threw myself into anything, just for the experience.  I learned from everything.

"The Impassioned Pistachio" is a pistachio cupcake with a vanilla bean buttercream, crumbled pistachios and a maraschino cherry on top.  Made with Delitia butter, it's full of that earthy terroir only made from the Parma and the Reggio Emilia cows, and a delicate nutty warmth.
  
As I approach my 25th birthday celebration in Bologna, the city where I lived, I think of how that year changed me.  I'm no longer the girl who came home after a month at college, arms flailing as I passionately tried to convince my parents that Gumboot dancing with the children in South Africa was my true life calling.  I'm also not the new college graduate, entering a different kind of "real world," full of wild hope and cocktail dreams. 

Someone once told me that your late twenties are a little more calm, a little less "rollercoaster ride."  Five years ago, that seemed ludicrous to me, and I snarkily replied, "where's the fun in that?"  But as I approach them, a few years of recklessness, a couple of heartaches and some spontaneous wandering behind me, I finally get what she meant.  Though I feel just like that wide-eyed twenty year old, ready to launch into flight back across the pond, somehow, I feel more grounded than ever.   

Notes from the Field: Ethnographic Studies in Cupcaketology

While anthropology aims to look outward to understand what's inside, to truly grasp the essence of, well, our "humanness", sometimes we need to spend more time. Anthropologists use ethnography, a holistic experience-based study, to understand culture in this truest context.

Drumroll please...

The Cupcaketologist is launching an set of ethnographic and collaborative case reports - a true study in friendship, life history, and shared kitchen chaos, freshly baked from the ovens of friends, families, and more.

Because who better to help us understand ourselves than the people that we share our lives with...


Photo: Margaret Mead, Samoa. (via)

Case Study 35: "The Enchanted Pumpkin"

Shakespeare famously warned, "'Tis now the very witching time of night, when churchyards yawn and hell itself breathes out contagion to this world." The autumn season holds more than just apple cider and falling leaves, for at its heart is the most frightful of holidays. Before candy corn began hitting stores in August, and every costume was a naughty one, I always found a sort of romantic and sad madness in the Halloween season. That rather than be about gore and fishnets, what lies within is truly about bewitchment and mystery. It's what is unseen and then assumed in the stolen glances and enchanting moments that brew the magic.

"The Enchanted Pumpkin" is a light pumpkin cupcake with a maple cream cheese buttercream encrusted in toasted pecans and topped with a cinnamon frosting.

It's the haunting face of the jack-o-lantern as the fire turns his flesh inside out. The silhouette of a black bird perched on a freshly bare branch against the crooked icy moon. It's the slightly unnerving feeling that for one night in the world someplace in time, things were not quite as they seemed.

Dusty Springfield - Spooky - Watch more Videos at Vodpod.

Case Study 34: "The Cookie Crumble"

"Sometimes good things fall apart so better things can fall together."- Marilyn Monroe

Like most kids in the kitchen, I started out a cookie baker- I think it was just in my blood. A true Italian bambino, I teethed on unfrosted anginetti cookies and as I got older, I naturally dunked anise biscotti into coffee for breakfast. But I made my personal foray into baking with chocolate chip cookies. Perfecting my recipe meant altering it constantly, which seemed to happen naturally as I got older and life changed more frequently. The cookies were no longer basic. They contained four types of smashed chocolate, coconut, and occasionally "everything but the kitchen sink."

And then one day, I just lost it. My cookies stopped turning out as I wanted, and as it goes, I stopped turning them out.

"The Cookie Crumble" is a vanilla cupcake with a cookie dough center, brown sugar buttercream frosting and chocolate chip cookie star on top. Through all of its grandiose interpretations, its deconstruction, and its rebirth, the noveau chocolate chip cookie is merely a simple one again. Good butter, chocolate, and a little sea salt on top. Because like life itself, no matter how many changes it goes through- the loves, the losses, the successes, and the moves- what is most basic and natural comes out on top in the end.

And that's just how the cookie crumbles.

Case Study 33: "The Back to School Special"

Nostalgic. That's how I feel every year when September fades away. Unlike the warm embrace of the summer wind, one fall breeze whips in and my body remembers it- the way it feels as the earth moves closer to its farthest tilted axis on an eternal trip around the sun. And September's end always held the inevitable for me: the bonfires and football games, the earthy smell of a freshly sharpened Ticonderoga No. 2 and the frantic scramble to enjoy the dwindling sunlight hours before the New England grayness set in.

"The Back to School Special" is a scholastic-inspired trio of cupcakes that are dedicated to the first day of school jitters, the tire swing and monkey bar playgrounds, and the brown-bagged lunchroom antics.

The "PB&J" is a peanut butter cupcake filled with strawberry jam and topped with a strawberry jelly buttercream and toasted peanuts. Before the era of widespread peanut/gluten allergies and political correctness, the basic Peanut Butter and Jelly sandwich was a staple in the diet every elementary school child, recording the lifelong marriage of "fruit and nut" in the Bible of Good American Eatin'.
"The S'more" is a chocolate cupcake atop a graham cracker crust with a Hershey's chocolate buttercream and toasted marshmallow on top. Whether you toasted "shmallows" on a backwood camping trip or melted your chocolate at a Homecoming bonfire, S'mores told us Americans that there's magic in good old processed cookies, candy, and fire. Combined or separate.
And lastly, "The Idyllic Apple" . Regardless of if you ate an "apple a day" or you were a "hot for teacher" apple-polisher, the apple has long been a reminder of brown-nosing scholarly excellence, and a true emblem for back-to-school memories.

They say that your sense of smell is the strongest in evoking memories, but with the change of seasons, I beg to differ. Though the first smell of musty rain can signal the start of spring, it's the feel that winter is creeping in and the tastes of my schoolgirl lunches that tell me it's not far off. Those days of playground flirtation and soccer games may be long gone, but that stubborn old autumn wind just brings me back every year...