Bite of Brainfood Blog

The Community MVPs rang in December with a fun field trip to DC’s lovely Grand Hyatt.  Staff from the hotel’s restaurant, Cure, and from the human resources department helped to make our experience very enjoyable.  Four lucky ladies were chosen to stay behind to do a “secret” workshop with managers from Cure while the rest of the group was led on a tour of the hotel. 

Can you imagine baking and selling over 1,000 cupcakes each day? And hand frosting each one? That's what the folks at Sprinkles do each and everyday starting at 4am (Frosters start at 5am)!

This week Brainfood was lucky enough to take a field trip over to Georgetown and sneak a peek into one of the newest cupcake shops to hit DC. Sprinkles welcomed our Columbia Heights Tuesday & Thursday class to hang out for an afternoon and learn about the cupcake business. We learned all about how Sprinkles makes their cupcakes, markets them and even donates all their leftover cupcakes at the end of the evening. Most importantly, we learned how to make their famous (and delicious) vanilla frosting and how to hand frost cupcakes. After a frosting lesson from their general manager Terra, all our youth got a chance to frost and decorate 2 cupcakes. We learned it’s pretty tricky and we may need a bit more practice before they are Sprinkles worthy, but they looked awesome for first timers.

Check the out our cupcakes:

Hello everyone, my name is LaSchellé Owens, I am the new instructor here at Brainfood-Chinatown location, I am so happy to be apart of Brainfood Kitchen All Star program this school year. My students are all from different schools in DC. I met such great students who are excited about learning, building life skills, and new cooking skills. I am learning so much myself as well. I am pumped up about what we have in store for the students this school year. So far we have started off with baking.  Our recipes varied from Chocolate Swirl Cheesecake Brownies and Vegan Pumpkin Pie Chocolate Chip Muffins to Cheddar Biscuits and Sweet Potato Biscuits. Which by the way were all DELICIOUS!!!  Everyone was so proud of their new found baking skills, such as sifting flour, separating an egg and measuring the “Brainfood Way” and so was I.  

From our Guest Bloggers  and summer interns Zoe Middleton & Matt Grunewald...

My time as one of Brainfood’s Summer Institute interns has been incredibly rewarding.   I was generously given the support I needed to flourish and the flexibility to combine youth development and cooking with my interest in wellness and food access. Even more notable than the easy-going and civilized office culture at Brainfood were the students that filled our kitchen between June and August. It is the time spent with any of our twenty students – either en masse, in smaller groups or individually – watching them grow and challenge their thinking while kneading pizza dough, washing dishes, perusing a farmer’s market or sitting down to a meal that truly thrilled me.  The progress they made in the space of five weeks as chefs and young adults was inextricably linked and profound.  In many ways, I grew alongside these students, becoming more committed to my career interests of public health and community development as well as learning how to communicate and execute fieldwork.  My great wish for our Summer Class of 2011 and myself is that the lessons of Brainfood (whether imperceptible or obvious) resonate long after the final leftovers from Open Kitchen Night are eaten.