베이킹을 사랑해! I Love Baking!

Fulbright Fall Conference was last weekend, and one of the events was a bake sale as part of a fundraising effort for various Fulbrighter-led initiatives. My contribution was a batch of persimmon cupcakes (with persimmon frosting!) and Oreo brownies! My friend Katelyn, who baked peanut butter-chocolate chip cookies, and I together raised about $70 for the North Korea Defector tutoring program in Daegu.

I documented my uber-baking process, which began at 6am the morning before I was to leave for Gyeongju. I got up before sunrise, baked for three hours straight, cleaned for one hour, packed, and was out the door by 10:30am.

The set-up: some new baking pans, a new muffin tin! And all the ingredients up top: peanut butter, persimmons, Oreos, chocolate... Dang, seeing this makes me excited to bake again.

Oreo brownies: one layer of cookie dough, one layer of Oreos, and one layer of brownies. Recipe from here.

The finished product! It was very sweet, but not as melty or moist as I'd have liked. Still, not bad for the first try.

Persimmon cupcakes, just out of the oven! I mostly followed this recipe from the Cupcake Project, but used cinnamon instead of pumpkin pie spice and also added crushed walnuts per a recipe I got from my aunt. (The idea was inspired by her own persimmon cake, so thanks, A-koh!)

Here's the first batch! Persimmon cupcakes, with persimmon. :) Cute, but a bit flat. Perhaps more baking powder next time to help them rise. Also, more flour to counteract too much juice from the fruit.

I also made persimmon frosting! Without powdered sugar (confectioner's sugar), I had to go with a recipe that used granulated sugar, but it turned out better than I could have imagined, anyway. Butter, sugar, milk, flour (?!), and one persimmon, whipped together like mad and refrigerated for a few hours. I frosted them just before the bake sale, so that it wouldn't melt. They were a hit. I even sold cups of extra frosting for a buck each; I'm not kidding.

Oh and here's another thing I did a few weeks ago: cinnamon sugar sweet potato fries. Yum!

I love baking and I will try to get better at it throughout the year. Fall is definitely here. How do I know? The weather is chillier and I've caught a cold. Time to try recipes with pumpkins (Korean pumpkins, 호박, are quite different from American ones) and Korean pears!