When everything goes wrong, you open a beer!

Sorry for the long gap in the posts guys! Cupcakes keeping us busy :)

We talked about all the nice things, let's now talk about all the not-so-nice things about baking!  There was this one day when everything was going smooth. We head back from office. It was all hunky dory, our batter was ready, both chocolate and vanilla, we were super efficient. Like we usually do, we tasted the batter to see if anything was missing. And it just tasted grainy. We looked at each other and tasted more and more of that batter to check what was wrong, looked at the consistency and wondered if there was some ingredient that was not working: we put too much of it or too less of another. We then think maybe it's just us and put a tray of 9 vanilla of our regular cupcakes into the oven and wait with bated breath. Simultaneously we  tasted the sugar, the salt, the vanilla essence, the milk, the baking powder even! We thought it was the eggs then. Suddenly we look at our freshly opened All-Purpose Flour pack and taste that and it seems non-(all purpose) flour-ish. It tasted funny and we zero in on our culprit. The oven says a "ting" and we go get the cakes out. We wait for them to cool down and eat one. The cakes tasted weird.  We eat more of it to figure out what it exactly that flavor was, and voila! it's rice! We look at the flour again and looks like the store sold us a pack of rice flour instead of all-purpose flour and labelled it incorrectly! We had batter worth 40 cupcakes, eh.... rice cupcakes in this case, ready and we had to just throw all of it and start making a fresh batch! We opened a new pack of flour and started the process all over again! By the time we finished that night it was 1 am.

There's this another really harrowing story. We were expecting a friend of ours, Vasu, to come in and click pictures of our cupcakes. This particular day we had only chocolate to bake, so we put a batch in.  We get the buttercream for the icing ready and wait for the cakes to bake and start the frosting. Except, when we poked a toothpick in the cakes to check if they were done, they  start sinking and  inside it was still un-cooked. This was unusual. We take the tray out and poke all cakes and they all sink. They are perfect examples of Domino's Choco Lava cakes and they taste heavenly too, but they are not cupcakes! We didnt know what we put  (or didn't put) that caused it. We would have loved to have a recipe for a choco-lava cake but we just didn't know how we did it! Our friends helped finish that batch of choco-lava cakes, but we had to prepare fresh batter, because we certainly could not give coho-lava cakes instead of cupcakes :) So we get the dry ingredients in and open a new pack of eggs. We break one egg (fortunately not into the dry mixture) and it's spoilt, we open another, it's spoilt too. We opened 10 and each and every one of it was rotten! We looked at each other and almost cried. This was when we called Vasu and said  'we're really sorry Vasu, but looks like we can't do the photo-shoot today'.  He was already on his way and we felt terrible about it. At 11:00pm at night, one of us call our moms and gets an old-school recipe and start with only 3 eggs :) When we put the tray in, both of us were covered with all kinds of sweet and not so sweet stuff.

Fortunately (and we thanks to mom! ) they came out perfect. We iced them and sat down after we prepared the boxes and opened a beer, looked at each other and laughed out aloud!

So when everything goes wrong, open a beer!

Cheers,
The Cupcake Shop

Chocolate Chocolate Everywhere!

"Mom these are just cupcakes not entire cakes! So they are way easier!", we thought. And we thought wrong. Our first order was a bunch of 50 cupcakes, all chocolate buttercream.  We got home after work, picked up a few supplies on our way home and started baking. This was a huge order compared to our usual baking sizes of 12-14 cupcakes. The pick up time was 11:00pm in the night, and we had a long way to go. We got the flour, butter, sugar, eggs all out and started. We put the first batch in, waited it to cool, got the second batch in and started frosting the first. It was like an assembly line production. And people who watched us work saw the tension on our faces! It was our first order and it had to be perfect!

We tasted the batter, we tasted the frosting, oh! we tasted everything! Im sure both of us had 6 kgs of sugar & butter mixture each in our bodies and chocolate that equals 3 bars of Cadbury each! After five whole batches, of chocolate  cupcakes with chocolate cream, we had chocolate on our clothes and our faces.

Our first order was pure hard work and sheer resilience! When we packed the boxes and stuck a personalized note on the box, we sat down and looked each other and smiled. Roopa finally heated some food and we sat and ate out of the same plate, exhausted, but excited on how our first order will be received. If anyone offered us a chocolate at that moment we would have cried at the sight of it.

This delivery was to go all the way to Bangalore, so we packaged it well and hoped that there was no turbulence in mid-air. We received our payment yesterday and got a friend to take a picture of us! Yes, we can be embarrassing sometimes! The folks in Bangalore loved it and nothing could please us more :)
Here's a picture of a couple of them from that delivery:

We baked tons this week. After the chocolate chocolate order we had a friends birthday and he is a football fan, so we baked him football cupcakes which had green grass frosting and a chocolate football which we designed! The recipe we used for these cupcakes was  a little crunchy on the top, so when you bite into the cupcake you will taste the chocolate ganache icing and  then the little brownie crunch and then the heavenly dark chocolate cake. The guys at the party loved it. We will soon upload pictures of those cupcakes, look out for updates on our site!

Our next baking assignment was for three friends! One was a guy who helped us with the very first pictures on our site! His sister is expecting, so we made a box of half pink and half blue cupcakes! The pink cupcakes was our first try with raspberry frosting! The heat in Hyderabad caused it to melt, but thankfully we refrigerated it immediately after it was on the cupcakes, so they looked and tasted delightful! For another very very gracious friend who designed our logo (you will all soon see it on our website and here) we sent a box of absolutely awesome looking cupcakes with cute designs, we tried hard to not eat them ourselves! For the third friend who was going home to Bombay and requested for a box, we made a set of delightful colors : yellow,  pink, orange, green, blue & purple! We also tried Oreo frosting and though the consistency got a little hard it was perfectly beautiful to eat! We learnt a secret on how to keep it looking fresh and tasty and will try it with our next batch :)

We finally decided it was time to take some time off and give the baking a rest for two days before we start working on our next orders! So both of us are headed out catching up on IPL matches and movies! Keep reading to know our next updates! For all you Red Velvet fans ~~~~~ you'll be delighted soon!

This week has been full of baking for friends and we've enjoyed it! There's quote on friends and cupcakes:

Friends are like Cupcakes in my pantry of memories.

Definitely holds true for us!

Love,
Roopa  & Nayana

How It All Began.

One evening after work, a bunch of us were thinking about our careers, life, education,,, the drill when we thought we should be doing something with our spare time.  As usual, we spoke about it and did nothing. After 5 mins we changed the topic. Except when we suddenly spoke about getting a cake for a friend's bday from a bakery and we decided how cute it will be if we had cupcakes instead of cakes!

When we were exploring where to get good customized cupcakes from, we realised we did'n't have a single specialized cupcake shop! And so the idea evolved into, let's try baking this weekend and check it out!

After a good deal of shopping in General Bazaar in Hyderabad for all our supplies, we came home and started to bake. We researched and researched and researched and found a nice recipe, called our mom's on the phone and took tips and baked. When we put our first batch of cupcakes in the oven to bake, we had a gang of four girls looking over our shoulders and observing our every move, waiting with bated breath for the cakes to bake. They had a party to go to on a saturday night, but no one would move until they had had a cupcake each. When we put on our oven gloves to take out the tray we heard excited squeals and claps and "oooh" and "aaah"s,  before we could even finish the Chocolate Ganache and Butter Cream frosting on those cakes, they were gobbled up. Satisfied souls finally went into their rooms to get ready for their party, while we, baked another set.

This time around we actually decorated them with the frosting and sprinkles, while one of our friends wrote "Happy Bday Dhruv" on them! At the birthday party, while we were waiting for the birthday boy to come back from dinner, everyone just wanted to take a piece each! One even asked us if he could eat the "B" in the "BDAY", because "Happy Day Dhruv" still makes sense. We stood and guarded our precious little cupcakes! When Dhruv walked in we heaved a sigh of relief and sat down!

So what began with just "baking for a friend" turned into an extremely enjoyable exercise, filled with excitement and anxiousness and pure joy and we decided to do it all over again for a bunch of friends who had got promoted at work!

Only when we got them to our work place the next day did we realise that they were actually a hit! And people were giving us orders for more. And then we decided to make this project of ours work and called ourselves "The CupCake Shop".

We have our tiny little marketing team,  we are blessed with multi talented friends who take awesome pictures and are creative! With their help and advise we finally launched on the morning of May 18th 2011 when we received our first order!

The CupCake Shop is now officially open in Hyderabad!

Please check-out our site : www.thecupcakeshop.in

Here's to more nights/evenings and weekends filled with sugar & spice and everything iced!

~
Roopa & Nayana
The CupCake Shop