I was born at 11:11pm on Jan. 2, 1983. That’s right, a mere forty-nine minutes before the 92nd anniversary of JRR Tolkien’s birth.
Actually, now that I think about it, with the time change, that’s really 311 minutes into the 92nd anniversary of JRR Tolkien’s birth...
So really Tolkie and I have the same birthday, because while he was born on Jan. 3 in South Africa, it was still Jan. 2 in New Jersey, where I’d be born 92 years later.
SWEET!
You know what else is sweet? Cupcakes. Especially vegan cupcakes. And getting Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero’s book Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World for your birthday.
Which is exactly what happened to me this year, 2008, a mere 25 years after the earth first felt my presence. Two of my greatest friends and bunny-sitters extraordinaire found and purchased this fantastic cookbook for me. It’s a collection of 75 completely cruelty-free cupcake recipes. So naturally I decided to devote my life to baking each and every one, tackling roughly one recipe per week.
The results so far? My fridge and pantry are filled with yum. My friends visit more often. My family wants me to come home every weekend. My co-workers no longer refer to me as “Carrot Stick,” they refer to me as “Carrot Stick with the delicious cupcakes.” Every day, in every way, my life is radically improved. So to share and spread the revolution, I’ve created this extra-special feature to chronicle the wonder of cupcakes. Recipe-by-recipe, I’ll post a rehash of my cupcaking adventures: the behind-the-scenes experience of hunting ingredients, making substitutions, and trying new techniques. I’ll give you the page references in VCTOTW to follow along. Hopefully my taste-testers will be willing to post their comments as well. (Pretty please with a cupcake on top?) What I won’t do is publish the recipes themselves, for the simple reason that they aren’t mine to do with as I choose willy-nilly. You’ll have to go straight to the source for those.
If you’re intrigued by what you see here, check out Isa & Terry’s other projects at the Post Punk Kitchen, or PPK for short. Because PPK sounds like a guerilla resistance group somewhere in the rainforest or the windswept wilderness. And I don’t have any evidence that it’s not.
To get started reading about cupcakes, click the revolutionary rallying cry below:
3 Comments
May 19, 2008 at 4:56 pm
it’s true…she really WAS born at 11:11 on Jan. 2, 1983! (just in case you were skeptical!) -and she was actually in the middle of telling a story at the time! come to think of it, i never DID get to hear the beginning!
May 19, 2008 at 5:55 pm
you talk as if you were there.
:P
June 9, 2008 at 4:35 pm
oooooo…i was very there! (cj malerich was also there and saw to it that the lights were dim, and the water was warm, and that from the very beginning you experienced the world as a warm and welcoming ocean of love!)