Terrible at Blogging but Apparently Great at Baking :)

Well, I have been absolutely horrible at keeping you updated on the many adventures I am undertaking here in South Korea. For that, I apologize. I will try to get better at it. So many exciting things have been happening, but the most exciting, is a new cupcake business I am in the process of starting! Because of this new endeavor, this will be a blog specifically about baking experiements, sucesses, and failures. My other adventures can be found here:

http://worldofkimchiandkpop.blogspot.com/

Now for the exciting baking news:

It all started with a simple request from my husband. He desperately wanted a good cupcake, but try as we might we could not find a bakery in town that sold cupcakes. After searching high and low, I decided to attempt baking him cupcakes from scratch. I had never baked anything from scratch before, but we started ambitiously. I made him maple bacon cupcakes. It took all day and three different batches until they came out right, but when I was finished, they were delicious!  I was exhuasted from an entire day in my tiny tiny Korean kitchen, but I had enjoyed myself so much.

Here in Gwangju, we have a local restaurant and grocer that kind of caters to the foreign population in the city.  They are The First Alleyway and The Underground Grocery. We frequent the grocer very often because they carry the coveted Dr. Pepper and most recently added deli meat to their inventory. I had promised a Korean woman that works there that I would bring her a cupcake, because she had never had a cupcake in her entire life. So after I mastered the maple bacon cupcake, I headed downtown to let her try them. She was not there, but the owner of the First Alleyway was. I casually mentioned I was trying to find a way to start selling my cupcakes because Justin and I had toyed with the idea and he not only offers to buy them from me, but to get me ingredients and cost and let me use their oven! The oven part is a huge deal. My kitchen is so small. We are in a very tiny loft apt in a high rise building and two people are not able to fit. We also do not have an oven. We bought a toaster oven so I bake my cupcakes in a tiny six count cupcake tin. Needless to say baking even one batch of cupcakes six at a time takes quite awhile.

Several short meetings later and we are in the stages of working out the financial details but it is definitely happening! I have been baking non-stop because through this entire ordeal I have found that I really love it. So far, I have tried Coca-Cola cupcakes, Coconut Key Lime cupcakes, Maple Bacon, Lemon, Carrot Cake, Brownie cupcake with Cream Cheese frosting, Vanilla with chocolate/vanilla buttercream swirl, and almond cupcakes with chocolate buttercream. They turn out better and better with every recipe I try! I plan on documenting each new recipe and updates on where you can buy my lovely cupcakes once I am officially in business!