One of Iris’s favorite books of the year was Cupcakes by Elinor Klivans. There are many books about cupcakes, but most of them seem to be more about making frosting roses or providing a souvenir than about making great-tasting desserts.

I’m all for hitting up Magnolia to mack on some cupcakes, but cupcakes are easy to make at home, and Klivans’s book has some great ideas. It also has pictures, which Iris has been identifying (“nutty,” “crumb,” “chocly”) since before she was one-and-a-half. There’s nothing in it that wouldn’t be appealing to kids, but nothing looks like a Baskin-Robbins clown cone, either–not even the cupcakes served in ice cream cones.

Iris selected the White Mountain Chocolate Cupcakes (aka “creamy”), which are supremely tender cakes topped with seven-minute frosting, something I’d never heard of before Laurie made these cupcakes. It’s called seven-minute frosting because you beat it for seven minutes. It’s basically a meringue, and it tastes like marshmallows.

People often say that cupcakes are just a vehicle for frosting, but in Iris’s case, the cupcake and frosting together are vehicles for sprinkles. There was much discussion over which kind of sprinkles Iris would have, and she ended up with colorful sanding sugar. Later she ate some polka-dot sprinkles, just plain.

I often cut up food for Iris even though she doesn’t really need the help anymore. We let her attack the cupcake whole. She got so much frosting on her face that it looked like she’d been on fire and we had to unload the extinguisher on her.

Next year I’m hoping Iris will request the Chocolate Mousse Cupcakes, because for me, a cupcake is just a vehicle for chocolate mousse.

Everyone knows what an instant-read thermometer is. It’s a thermometer you stick into a piece of food and it instantly tells you the temperature. Right?

You wish. An instant-read thermometer is any thermometer that doesn’t have to be stuck into the food *while it’s heating up* in order to get an accurate reading. My old Taylor instant-read took about a minute to get a reading. When I break out the thermometer, it’s because I want to know whether something is done *now,* not so I can stick my hand into a hot oven for a minute like a jackass.

So I got a Thermapen. The Thermapen lives up to the phrase “instant-read”: you stick it in, and it tell you the temperature in four seconds, max, and usually more like two seconds. It has a range of -58°F to 572°F. It comes in colors, like the late iPod mini. There’s an optional belt holster, which of course I bought, because in my book there’s no such thing as an *optional* holster.

No thermometer is perfect, and there are a couple of downsides to the Thermapen. First, the quick reading depends on the thermometer having a thin, sharp tip. You could poke your eye out, but more to the point, it’s delicate. I don’t think it’s going to be a problem, but if this is something you’re worried about, you can order a Thermapen with a thicker tip that is hardier but takes ten seconds to read.

Second, you can’t switch the Thermapen between Fahrenheit and Celsius. You can get a Celsius-only model, but only in gray.

Third, and I know you’re waiting for this, the Thermapen costs a bundle. The thermometer itself is $85. Throw in the holster and shipping, and you’re close to $100. Do you really need a $100 thermometer? Maybe not. If you cook meat, make candy, or deep-fry regularly, the Thermapen will save you many headaches. If you don’t eat meat, candy, or fried foods, probably you gave up on this blog weeks ago. So I guess you need a Thermapen.

You can order the Thermapen from [Thermoworks](http://www.thermoworks.com). I haven’t had the occasion to use their tech support yet, but this is an encouraging sign:

> When you call, we don’t need to transfer you to a half-dozen different folks before you get what you need. We promise, no transfer or one transfer. And, we have real people answer the phone. No automated reception software.

We enjoyed our Vancouver vacation so much that Laurie and I are talking about renting a downtown condo for a week or two next year. It’s one thing to admire kaffir limes and chilaca chiles, quite another to be able to actually cook with them.

“We could even invite some people over for dinner,” said Laurie.

“I have a better idea,” I replied.

A couple of weeks ago I was listening to The Splendid Table with Lynne Rossetto Kasper. A caller described a new Paris trend: *restaurants éphémères*, or temporary restaurants. A top chef (such as Pierre Gagnaire and Alain Passard) will open a restaurant and keep it open for a week or two, taking no reservations and serving high-end food at low prices. It’s a way of having fun and keeping the chef’s name in the headlines. Here’s Chocolate and Zucchini’s post about dinner at Végétable, Passard’s ephemeral restaurant of last spring.

So I figure I’ll open my ephemeral restaurant in an undisclosed downtown Vancouver location for one week during winter vacation every year. You’ll have to reserve years in advance. There will be a single menu served to all guests with no substitutions. It would be called Aux Racines et Vers. Iris will open every dinner with a toast, or possibly several pieces of toast.

Okay, I don’t have to guts to do this, and I’m not a good enough cook, but if you want to come by for dinner next December, let me know.

We’re back from Vancouver with some good contraband. On Wednesday took the Aquabus to Granville Island. Iris loved Granville Island, partly because when we said we were taking a ferryboat to the Island, she said, “Just like Frog!” There’s a Frog and Toad story where Frog wants to spend some time alone, so he goes and sits on an island. So presumably Iris was imagining an island of a few square feet in the middle of a pond where she could sit in solitude.

Instead, she ran around the public market building, got extremely rained on, and played at the Kids Market. We played many games of Skee-Ball and won a slinky. I also loved the Island, because I went to Oyama Sausage, which has the most incredible charcuterie case I’ve ever seen. We needed snacks for the trip back. How to decide? I ended up getting some spicy wild boar salami and goose breast prosciutto. The goose prosciutto was especially good, and it tasted remarkably similar to ham. Similar enough, in fact, that when we got to the border, I declared our meats, and our remaining salami was confiscated, but the prosciutto was waved through on the grounds that, “The prosciutto is okay because it’s just ham.”

I also stopped at South China Seas Trading Co, a small Asian imports store that seems to specialize in products that are hard to find elsewhere. They had beautiful looking fresh kaffir limes and, amazingly, fresh green peppercorns. I have been missing fresh peppercorns since our last visit to Thailand in 2001, and here they are. I don’t know if it’s illegal to import them, but I conveniently forgot to mention them at the border, so now they’re in my fridge. I keep reaching in, twisting off peppercorns, and snacking on them. A fresh green peppercorn tastes like a mild tropical fruit (such as green papaya) infused with black pepper. Tomorrow I’m going to put them into a curry.

Note the fresh chilaca peppers on the right; these are the fresh version of dried pasillas. Since I haven’t been to Mexico (other than Tijuana), I’ve never seen them *anywhere* before.

This is not my first adventure with potentially illegal peppercorns, but it’s the best yet.