Sugar is Just Sugar

Recently, I had the experience of watching Cupcake Wars with my niece who loves the show... her favorite is the critiques. She gets all excited about who is going to win and in all seriousness, all of the contestants are very professional and skilled at what they do. The fact that one person may make a mistake or create a "hideous" "flat" "flavorless" cupcake, according to Florian is probably just good TV drama and also based on the ridiculous ingredients they force them to use in a cupcake.  I mean, seriously, who wants to eat a salami cupcake??? That is just disgusting and wrong.

For the record, I'm extremely close minded in the sense that I think certain words in cooking have meaning. Not everything is a cupcake just because it is cooked in a muffin tin and wrapped in paper. To me a cupcake is SWEET... always sweet...it is a dessert. 

Other things that are in the shape of a muffin and are savory, would be some kind of a biscuit or maybe even a pie... not a cupcake.  Doing savory cupcakes makes me sick just to think about it. I know- I'm so old fashioned. But who asked me anyway? nobody...  

One day, when we were watching Cupcake Wars, with my family- it was the perfect opportunity to get into the kitchen and do our own creating. I looked up a basic vanilla cupcake recipe that was very easy using google. I know that cupcakes are flour, sugar, butter, eggs, and leavening. A recipe gave me the right proportions and we had everything we needed. And we got my dad's secret icing recipe which is impossible to improve upon and bound to secrecy. We wanted basic ...because we were going to have fun decorating.

We emptied the secret stashes of candy that they had tucked away in their rooms, or in the freezer for a special occasion, and we dumped it all out into little containers and using plates and knives- they began to create. It was pure joy. There really were no rules and I enjoyed seeing them take liberty with Sugar.

Sugar has gotten so villified in the media with more and more pressure being placed on people who eat the stuff and more and more horrible comparisons for people who make anything sweet. So there is that old saying that anything good is either ILLEGAL, IMMORAL, or FATTENING... but I really think that is the wrong approach to take with Sugar. Is it really wrong to love sugar? Is it wrong to have any emotional feelings about it at all? After all- it is just sugar. Not awesome. Not horrible. Just sugar.

I think it is more healthy to have a balance of LIKING it, Eating it, and then also knowing when you need other healthier options. Its not always a cupcake day- and too much of a good thing can make you sick....
but who wants to only eat salad, or only lettuce... that kind of restrictive perfectionism won't get us anywhere...

we need to have fun with our food-
and to be in control of our own appetites-
EAT it. Don't Eat it. Full. Hungry....
and .... hmmm...I prefer Spinach today...
we should aim for FREEDOM...

not some kind of puritanical goal.