This weekend, I met with Darcy, Jenn, PJ and Victoria at Momofuku Milk Bar to have a long overdue reunion and visit our fellow FCI graduate Christina.  While eating some of Christina’s creations (volcano, pork bun, blue cheese polenta, cinnamon bun and an assortment of soft serves) Darcy, Jenn, PJ and Victoria all agreed to start contributing to Chocolate Cubed!  They all bring very different passions to the team, which you will see expressed through their desserts, cakes, cookies and all their recipes.  Our goal of this site it to help motivate us to bake more as well as to share our ideas with the community, while learning from it at the same time.  

Over the next few weeks we will be writing bios of each of the chefs and then introducing them to you one by one.   I hope you are as excited as I am.

Whenever I look at the statistics for this site, I am always surprised by the amount of traffic I get from queries that include the word “chocolate” or “recipe”.  I shouldn’t be surprised because I have done some work in search engine optimization and the fact that the word “chocolate” is in every page title and is part of every URL makes the search engines think this site is all about chocolate.

So, instead of fighting to rank on other topics and inflating my bounce rate because I don’t talk enough about chocolate goodies, I have decided to convert this into a baking blog.  I have asked some of my fellow classmates from pastry school to help contribute and hope to begin this week.  For those of you that actually want to hear me rant about other stuff, I am going to launch jordansalvit.com over the next week as well.

I am very excited about this change and hope you are too!  Yay for more pastries and chocolate goodies!

Over the weekend I found out about this amazing event on the west coast:  Cupcake Camp.  Ariel Waldman organized the first camp this past spring in San Francisco and is in the process of organizing the second for this December.  It got me thinking that although foodies gather in NYC regularly to eat out and try all the cupcake places, including Magnolia, Crumbs, Buttercup, Cupcake cafe, etc…, it would be even more fun to have a camp.  Camp would be about learning different techniques, the effects of different ingredients and of course eat lots of yummy cupcake varieties.

I am not really sure how to go about this, but before I start any planning, are there any people in NYC that would be interested?  If so, send me a note either via twitter or comment here.  I bet I can talk to my old alma mater and see if they’d be interested in helping out.  If not, there are some fun people that I graduated the pastry program with that would love this.  

Although this is slightly premature, I am very excited about the idea!  If you are too, let me know!