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