Orange-Chocolate Chip Cupcakes with Chocolate Frosting (Page 722)

• Date: Saturday, October 21, 2006 - 9pm
• Location: Somerville, MA
• Kitchen: My Apartment
• Dining Companions: Lauren, Denis, Matty, Glen, Brett, Jessie, Max M, etc...
• Recipe Rating: B+

I made these cupcakes for Matt's party last Saturday because cupcakes are excellent party food! The recipe is for full-sized cupcakes, but I made them in a mini-muffin tin to make them even more party-appropriate. This meant I modified the baking time of course, but I didn't make any other changes. These cupcakes were pretty good. The cake itself had a nice orange flavor. I'm not a huge fan of chocolate chips in cake, but this recipe called for the mini chocolate chips, which are indeed preferable to the big ones for this use. I didn't love the pairing of the ganache frosting with the cake recipe (the frosting was too dense for cake this texture), but the flavors were good together. All in all, it was a good recipe for cupcakes with an interesting twist of orange.

I did laundry last night. For those of you who don't know me very well, this might not seem like much of an accomplishment... but those of you who do know me well will appreciate that this is not something I do very often. I actually enjoy doing laundry when there is a washer and dryer convenient to me. It's not the sorting, or folding, or any of that that I hate. Maybe the problem is that I let my laundry pile up so much that I always have to do multiple loads, and there is only 1 washer and 1 dryer in my building, so it takes forever and involves lots of trips back and forth to the basement. Even that doesn't sound so bad -- I'm not really sure what I hate about it actually, but for some reason I don't like to do laundry. When I was growing up my mom always did my laundry, and in college Emilee washed most of it (yes, she was the best roommate ever!). When I lived with Chris he did all the laundry. But now, I do it myself! Last night I just took it all to the laundromat so I could do it all at once. I love the laundromat -- I should always do my laundry there! Laundromats are always warm. It's a nice place to curl up in one of those totally uncomfortable plastic chairs and read a book. It was a good experience -- and now all my clothes are clean! There were things in my dirty laundry basket that I had forgotten that I even owned! Perhaps I should consider doing laundry more often...