Last hurrah baking: Babycakes NYC cookbook

The owner, Amanda, of Bake it Pretty let me borrow her copy of Babycakes NYC. I decided to bake quite a bit. After the initial cost of garbanzo-fava flour, arrowroot, potato starch, agave nectar, and spelt flour, baking isn't too difficult. The recipes call for quite a bit of coconut oil, but the book gives substitutions in the form of any other oil really. Anyways, it kind of weirds me out that coconut oil is solid at room temperature. Isn't that bad for you like fat that solidifies at room temp? I forget, but I won't worry about it now. I hear coconut oil is good for thyroid functioning.

I started with the vanilla frosting. I made the recipe twice because I froze it the first time and it just didn't work. The second time, it failed to solidify enough so I had more of a sauce with chunks of solid coconut oil. Again, gross.

First, I tried red velvet cupcakes before I bought all the others flours. It only calls for spelt. Somehow it was crumbly and hard. Maybe because I used cane sugar instead of agave though it's allowed.


I've been eating biscuits from Posana but thought I could make my own spelt biscuits. Spelt, apparently, is easier for digestion. They didn't quite rise.


Day 2, I tried again with agave nectar. I went on a rampage.

Vanilla cupcakes turned out good warm. The texture was different from the red velvet cupcakes and the recipe was totally different too. However, they tasted strange when cooled.


When I went to Babycakes NYC in LA, I tried a few things - not the cupcake - but I loved the chocolate chip cookies. The recipe was easy and the cookies ended up being my favorite! I added it to my repertoire of recipes.


Brownie gems turned out moist. Because it uses cocoa powder, I found that the taste is rather bitter... more so than dark chocolates even.


I enjoy the little stories before each recipe. Martha Stewart had Erin McKenna teach her how to make apple cinnamon toasties. Mine didn't turn out as crumbly as I expected. I toasted them again as recommended. They were better but not much.


I even made the hot chocolate recipe since I was in the mood for something warm. It was okay... too dark and bitter also (like the brownies).