I always wish I had access to a table large enough to seat 20 of my best friends around it for an epic dinner party. I still haven’t managed to acquire such a table or a room large enough to put it in, but I got a taste of what it might be like at a great event last night called the Hub Feast.  It’s a potluck and a dinner party,  a chance to meet great people and talk about all sorts of cool food things, and an opportunity to make an unnecessary amount of insanely indulgent peanut butter cream cheese-frosted cupcakes.  What more could you ask for?

The event took place at one of the Hubs:  a network of beautifully designed office/event/social spaces for members and their guests to work, meet, connect,  innovate, and more, located as close as Islington (the first one) and as far as Bombay and Sao Paulo. I’ve visited the gorgeous wood-beamed and exposed brick-walled Hub King’s Cross a few times to meet with our friends at Hide & Seek and so was excited to return for one of their monthly community feasts, described as follows:

The programme of Feasts for 2010 is well under way now and this month, we’ll be looking at Guerilla Food. Across London, there are people running underground restaurants, growing things in weird and wonderful places, cooking in unpredictable locations and using food in ways previously not explored. If you want to meet these people and find out a bit more about what they’re up to, we invite you to come along.

As always, you can expect to sit next to people who love food, cooking it, talking about it and most of all, eating it. So bring both an open mind and a dish to share to eat with people that love all things food. An informal evening with a very loose agenda, we hope to create a feast where conversation about food, life, love and everything in between, can flow freely.

We’ve been chatting with the lovely Hub folks including Holly, Alex, Lucy, and Eleanor about doing some events, so they invited us down to chat about Rambling Restaurant and underground supper clubs and all things delicious and exciting.  It all sounded like  pretty much like my ideal evening, so Sarah, foodrambler and I baked up a storm of lemon curd meringue roulades and several batches of the most insanely deliciously orgasmic Banana Cupcakes with Peanut Butter Cream Cheese Frosting.

A quick aside on these cupcakes: I’d recommend you don’t click that recipe. In all seriousness…it will haunt your dreams. The banana cupcakes are very good; the peanut butter cream cheese frosting will bring you to your knees in pure tastebud joy.  The sublime happiness is only slightly marred by the guilty knowledge that the peanut butter (fat) plus cream cheese (fat) plus salted butter (fat) plus icing sugar in this frosting  is probably at work hardening your arteries as soon as the  cupcake crosses your lips and the smile crosses your face.  However,  keep in mind that all this tasty fat and sugar are calories that humans are genetically hardwired to love. This means it is not my fault when I eat gargantuan mounds of the frosting piped onto cupcakes (dangerous), slathered onto apples (healthy!), spread onto bananas (still good!), licked off of several kitchen tools (not so much) and then, finally, by the unabashedly deliberate spoonful.  I guarantee you will do the same. Blame biology.

But back to the feasting – it was a lovely evening of meeting, chatting, and of course, lots of eating. We went around the table and introduced ourselves so everyone got to see who was there and their cool projects and organizations and affiliations. I had great conversations about cooking and food spaces with Holly from Food Stuff and talked sustainable food development with some great people from Forum for the Future and saw but didn’t get enough time to chat with Chris from the Real Bread Campaign.  Meanwhile I ate fresh bread, hummous, spicy ginger carrot beetroot salad, Spanish omelette, flapjacks, apple crumble, spinach and strawberry salad, couscous, roasted vegetables, and so much more.  One of my favorite dishes was an amazing wait-a-minute-this-is-vegan?-you-must-be-joking leek pie made by a really nice guy named Alessio, whom I tackled after dinner to express my delight in his dish and ask his secret. Apparently, it’s soy cream. Don’t worry, it’s not actually a secret.

It was a wonderful occasion to meet a lot of creative, friendly, interesting people, all equally in love with food and cooking and community and eating.  I’m excited for the next one.  You can come along too, but only if you promise to take home some cupcakes so I don’t have to.  I still have some leftover frosting in the fridge and it is calling to me to come eat it with a big spoon…

]]> http://eatfamilystyles.com/2010/04/29/community-feasting-and-the-best-cupcake-frosting-you-may-ever-put-in-your-mouth/feed/ 3 http://eatfamilystyles.com/2009/06/09/a-brief-interlude-of-cupcake-glorification-violet-cupcakes-at-broadway-market-are-lovely-bites-of-heaven/ http://eatfamilystyles.com/2009/06/09/a-brief-interlude-of-cupcake-glorification-violet-cupcakes-at-broadway-market-are-lovely-bites-of-heaven/#comments Tue, 09 Jun 2009 23:59:59 +0000 mei http://familystyles.wordpress.com/?p=1484

this  post is all about the best cupcakes i’ve had so far in london. i took kellin to visit the adorable and wonderful broadway market during her last hour in london before returning to italy. stuffed from our borough market visit, we brokenheartedly turned down wild mushroom risotto, ghanaian food, and roast hog with crackling sandwiches. but we decided to treat ourselves to ONE mini cupcake because they were so ridiculously cute, and obviously brownie mountains and fresh strawberries with jersey cream were not quite enough dessert for the morning.

so we stopped at the happy stall of violet cakes and bought the enticing rhubarb and rosewater mini cupcake, a pale  pink and perfectly formed little turkish dome of dessert.  it was, quite honestly, ethereally delicious. so light and smooth yet so intensely flavored, like having the essence of rose petals in your mouth. such a tiny bite yet such a concentrated burst of taste! we promptly returned and bought another.

salted caramel this time. buttery, sweet, reminscent of birthday cake but with just a tiny hint of saltiness to give it a grownup edge.  so good that we actually stopped walking, turned around and returned for a third. we ended with elderflower, which i’d only had in cocktails until then (side note: apparently you can go elderflower foraging in london, as evidenced by the locally grown cocktail served at sunday’s rambling restaurant. more on that coming soon!).  lightly perfumed, vaguely herbal, fresh-tasting and summery. truly incredible.

chatting with the cupcake sellers a bit, we discovered that the cupcake base is all the same – a light vanilla sponge cake – and the variations come from the perfectly symmetrical florettes of buttercream frosting lovingly squidged on top.  apparently the colors and flavors of the frosting are all natural; according to their sign, they use ‘pure fruit purees, flower essences, vanilla pods, Valrhona chocolate, dark caramel, or freshly brewed espresso’ to obtain those beautiful shades and unbelievable flavors. so gloriously delicious and also organic and all-natural. my mind is boggled that the intense purple hue of that candied violet cupcake isn’t made with food coloring!

trying to find out the genius behind these cupcakes, i’m stymied yet intrigued by the mysterious nature of violet’s website. all you see is a massive gorgeous photo of cupcakes and no information. but google says that the company was started by claire ptak, a former pastry chef at chez panisse.  this explains both the all-natural-organic thing as well as the oh-my-god-you’re-amazing thing.  chez panisse appears to have that effect on people.

i’m going to go out on a limb and say that i think i’ve just discovered the best cupcakes in london. and i haven’t even tried that many cupcakes in london. but i’ve ravaged the most famous and highly lauded new york cupcake shops like a japanese movie monster takes down tokyo – magnolia, sugar sweet sunshine, billy’s, and babycakes, to name a few – and based on these three incredible bites, violet just might be better. but you know what – it’s much too soon to say. clearly this is just  a hypothesis that can only be verified with a great deal of dedicated and thorough research. violet cakes, i’ll see you next saturday to begin my study…

***

I feel like I’ve finally settled a little here in London now that I am the proud recipient of an organic fruit and vegetable box scheme from a local company called Growing Communities. These box schemes are the equivalent of what we call Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) boxes in the States. As other writers have mentioned on Eat.Drink.Better, it’s a great way to support local farmers and have good produce around to eat!

I feel blessed to live in the same area as Growing Communities, because it means I get access to their boxes of local and organic fruits and veg (the nickname everyone gives to vegetables here). You have to live or work in the neighborhood of Hackney in order to be a part of the scheme, which I’ll explain below. Their box scheme is particularly cool for a couple of reasons:

1. Growing Communities is ‘committed to cutting food miles and supporting small sustainable farmers.’

They were London’s first box scheme, and now help distribute produce from over 25 organic farmers and cooperatives. A slip of paper arrives with the produce each week detailing the producers and country of origin of each included item and often includes a feature on a local farm.

2.  They never buy air-freighted produce.

Veggies come from farms all over Britain and some vegetables come from Italy. This seemed to contradict their claim about food miles until I remembered how close together the countries are in Europe. Right. The organic salad bags, which include some greens I can’t even identify as well as edible flowers, are grown right here in Hackney for just about zero food miles. Sweet.

3. The scheme is ‘collection-only,’ which minimizes pollution and food miles.

Instead of getting a box delivered directly to your house via truck like my CSA in San Francisco, you have to go pick up your bags (it’s not actually a box either) at a collection point. This seemed inconvenient, and might have even made it unable for me to join if I didn’t live in the Hackney area. Thankfully, I ended up moving next door to a collection point! Every week, I pick up my small bag of fruit and small bag of veg at Hackney City Farm next door. Yes. I live in the city. And I live next to a farm. Amazing!

4. Growing Communities delivers the produce to the seven collection points using either a bicycle

trailer, or Maisie, the electric cow float, pictured above.

Would it be weird if I got a Maisie for myself?

5. As if Growing Communities couldn’t get any more awesome, they also run a farmer’s market! It also happens to be the only all-organic farmer’s market in the UK. That even includes the cupcakes.

If you live in the Hackney area, you should join their box scheme! If you don’t live around here (which probably includes all of you Eat.Drink.Better readers), check out the principles behind Growing Communities for some inspiring and helpful information on real, sustainable food.

irene and lauren looking SAUCY. only second in attractiveness to a Duoseptuagenuple Stuf Oreo.

jasongraphix, you’re my hero.

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