Spicy Cookie Goodness

Hello lads and ladies!

It's that time again!  So many crazy things happen in December- for us grad students, it's finals time!  Balancing finals on top of work, projects, play, baking, and life, is incredibly difficult.  In fact, I should probably not be blogging right now and instead be writing outlines and such.  I am excited though, in true dork fashion, to write my next paper.  It's kind of about the bake sale!  I'm using theories of participation and discussions surrounding socially collaborative art (like those put in place by Grant Kester, Miwon Kwon, and Claire Bishop) to talk about the politics of art projects that use food and consumption as a platform for ideas about the nourishment of a community.  It's also about the (art) market and the reverse co-opting of commercial models.  Yeah!  It's a big 25 page-er, wish me luck!

In a few weeks Alicia and I will be at La Superette!  I'm so excited because I'm offering new cookie tins that I screen printed with my new friend Gabe Cohen (www.pangeacorps.com) at Exit Art!  They are so rad and rather smart looking.  I'm also so excited to be making the cookies for the tins- they are all family recipes that we've made for during the holiday season for many years.  Making the cookies above for the photoshoot got me a lil teary eyed- I miss my Gram!  She was the one who taught me how to make the Ruggulah cookies shown in the picture.  I actually won a Girl Scout Bake Off with these cookies when I was ten.  It was amazing!  I don't remember what I won but I think it's one of the very rare times I've won anything.

So- check out our website to order and then come visit us at La Superette at 159 John Street at South Street Seaport next Saturday and Sunday (Dec 13th and 14th) from 12-8pm (12-6pm on Sunday) to pick them up!  

See you soon,

xo Tracy

OCTOBER!

Well hello there!  Just wanted to let you know that bake sale photos from September and October 2008 are now up on our Flickr page!  Check em out!  And also, make sure you VOTE!

Blog I must!

Hello, friends!

I'm supposed to be doing homework right now, but I'm too distracted with all of the super delicious things happening over here at camp sweet tooth!  

We're in BUST Magazine this month!  We've been chatting about it for about a week or so already, carrying the mag everywhere we go to show friends and family and whipping it out at parties.  We're so proud yet still feel super humble- we couldn't have been chugging along on this super sweet highway without you!  You talk with us about recipes, about ingredients, about the best way to keep a cupcake moist and a cookie chewy.  We tip our hats to you, community!  Thanks ten tons!

We also just got a super exciting invitation to cater Fred Flare's super awesome store opening in Greenpoint this month.  Dudes, their store is called SUPER CUTE.  They seem to understand my soul in many ways over there at Fred Flare headquarters!  We're so excited for them and also for the super fun party!  We're making a boat load of mini cupcakes (birthday stylee, as it's also their 10th anniversary!), yummy peanut butter bombs (Peanutbutter sandwich cookies), and our famous mac and cheese.  Um, that sounds like a party I want to hang out at... how about you?  The event is on Friday, October 24th at 7pm.  Check out their website, www.fredflare.com for lots more info (and a hilarious, guts spilling video blog about the opening of the store- they're so cute and hyper that they make me feel like I'm on a sugar high!)  The hearts painted on the brown kraft paper covering the windows of STORE CUTE (this pic was taken in August) are by Chris Uphues, our new friend that we didn't know we had.

We're also excited about doing more deliveries- so excited that we're offering a 15% discount on all delivery orders right now!  We've made up little coupons that you'll probably see around various cool neighborhood hangs.  Let us bring you cookies!  Send us an email to see delivery menus, pricing, etc.

Also, we're launching what we're calling a retail initiative.  We're packaging up our cookies and bars into little cellophane bundles of sweetness and hoping to get some retail stores to carry them, in order to reach a broader community of guys and gals with a serious sweet tooth.  We'll keep you updated about where you can find our chewy chocolate chip cookies, oatmeal cream pies, peanut butter cookies, rebel bars, double milk chocolate chip cookies, snickerdoodles, sugar cookies, gingersnaps, etc. etc.  If you have a little store and you want some packages of cookies to make your cash wrap smell yummy and offer your customers something special and homemade, send us an email at sweettoothofthetiger at gmail dot com.

Whew!  We've gotten through September already!  Find images from our events at Secret Project Robot/Monster Island's block party, the Last Supper food and art festival at 3rd Ward, and Design Trust For Public Space's Reinventing Grand Army Plaza event under the arches at Grand Army Plaza on our flicker page: http://www.flickr.com/photos/sweettoothofthetiger 

We're really excited about October!  xo Tracy and Alicia

Seventh Inning Stretch

Dear Sweet Teeth,

 

As mid-August approaches, Sweet Tooth of the Tiger finds itself nearing the homestretch!  The last two weekends have featured double-headers of sorts--nearly back-to-back gigs, home-runs in every bite!  At Exit Art, we enjoyed lots of delicious conversations with new friends and acquaintances (SHOUT OUT to the dude in the orange tiger t-shirt who drunkenly regaled me with "Eye of the Tiger".  I don't know who you are, but you made my day).  

At NADA's County (Af)Fair, the performance pieces were as stimulating as the sweet treats.

Last weekend, we helped Printed Matter celebrate their T-shirt Party.    We discussed the trials and tribulations of t-shirt modeling, apron collections, and the best ingredients for a sugar-free baked good before heading to Secret Project Robot for their Drawing Brunch.  At the Drawing Brunch, participants' creative appetites were whetted by brunch-y booze and food as they drew on others' drawings.  The palimpsests made for colorful images and conversations.  For photos, please see our flickr page.

On deck, T-Top and I will be participating in two events close to our hearts and mission.  As the season wraps up, if you haven't come out to see us yet, save the dates:

August 9, 1:30-4:30pm

The Big She-Bang!

ABC No Rio

156 Rivington St. 

August 11, 5-8pm (reception 5-6pm)

Recipe Slam and Community Cookbook Craft-Nite

Etsy Labs

325 Gold St - 6th floor, Brooklyn, NY

Besties,

A-Rae and T-Top

On Fire

With the heat and humidity of summer stifling, T-Top (Tracy) and I often overhear people wonder how we can bake in this heat. As I sit in my poorly ventilated kitchen, penultimate batch of choco-rocket cookies in the oven, rocking out to Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire,” I’m unfazed; I’m on fire. Sylvia Plath I am not, but my oven has its own meditative pull. Allow me to muse a moment on heat, fire, and the like.

Truth be told, with every opening of the oven door, I feel not only the warm of so many BTUs on my face, but the warmth of so many memories in my heart: memories of rural Wisconsin summers. Young love, county fairs, skinned knees. I remember windows open wide, the smell of fresh-washed sheets wafting in from the line. Returning from the thrill of the berry hunt, snitching the ripest, reddest raspberries—one on each fingertip—before they could be turned into the most delicious homemade jam. For my family, summer was baking and canning season. It was a way of convening with the harvest, with each other, appreciating nature and family and interconnectedness. Having grown up in the Midwest, where affection isn’t communicated in words (take a listen to “Prairie Home Companion”), food equals love.

Even Johnny Cash sings: “The taste of love is sweet….”

I wooed my first love with a dozen cookies (store-bought) and a note:
“I like you. Do you like me? Check yes or no.”
Each arrow pointing to the yes box was one of Cupid’s arrows in my heart. Looking back at the break-up, a distance measured in months and miles, I blame the bakery.

And I bake today, in this heat, because I love participating in and nourishing community spirit. And because sweets are sweet!

I’m especially excited about this week’s events; they take me back to first loves and country summers:

Thursday, July 24, 7-10pm
Summer Mixtape Volume 1: Get Smart Edition, Opening
EXIT ART

Saturday, July 26, noon - 6pm
NADA County Fair

STEP RIGHT UP and buy sweet treats for your sweetheart!
Here’s the menu:

-Choose your own cupcake adventure: Mix-and-Match your favorite icing and cupcake flavors
-Cinna-choco-oat cookies
-ChocoRocket cookies
-Lemon Sandwich Cookies
-Chocolate Rebel Bars
-Snickerdoodles
-Strawberry Mint Pops
-Mango Pops

With love, cupcakes, and skinned knees,
Alicia

Cupcakes, popsicles, catering!

Hi lads and ladies!

Whew!  This past week has been super duper crazy!  Alicia and I had six events over the past 7 days.  We were at a book launch event hosted by MediaBistro.com, a VOTE or DIE event hosted by DeclareYorself.org, the After The Jump Fest sponsored by Gen Art, Secret Project Robot and Live With Animals, and finally, at the Brick Theater for a rad awards ceremony and boozy afterparty.  A big SHOUT OUT to all our friends, new and old (Chelsea and Tom, Ivy and Thew, Gyda, dude with the huge appetite for sweets at the Brick, Rachel and Erik, Grayson and Monica, Brian Zeger, and lots of others that shared their tips for stuff and smiled at us).  

We have a week or so off to handle our personal/other professional lives, as well as work on the administrative parts of the bake sale (i.e. making awesome new summery graphics!) and menu planning.  Popsicles will be a main staple (hopefully, if we can work out the cooler sitch well enough) at the next bake sales.  For the hottest days, you can count on us for some Lemonade-Basil, Wacky Watermelon, or Strawberry-Mint icepops!  And if everyone is good, maybe some vanilla puddin' pops (yes, they are delish, but are they refreshing enough?  Let me know!)

We are also expanding to offer catering and delivery services!  Our new arm is called Sweet Tooth by Lila, headed by Lila Dobbs, lady extraordinaire.  Lila has tons of experience creating and cooking for crowds.  The menus, pricing, etc. can be found here. We're even having a tasting event on Wed, July 2nd at 7pm at Brooklyn Kitchen (616 Lorimer Street).  The kids over at Brooklyn Kitchen are offering a 10% discount for guests of the tasting!  The sample menu is $7 per person, but that also includes a free pale or brown ale from Brooklyn Brewery.  Come and hang out!  RSVP here.

We've got some other exciting stuff in the works, including some really fun events at the end of July and August, a fun project including vintage recipe boxes and artist designed recipe cards, a recipe/baking/foodie ZINE, and other stuff as well.  Yeah, summer, keep it comin.

Healthy attitudes

I'm sipping coffee and gearing up for our day in the sunshine- today, Saturday June 21st, Sweet Tooth of the Tiger will be at the After the Jump Festival, hosted by Gen Art, on N6th Street between Berry and Wythe from 3-6 pm in Williamsburg.  After the Jump Fest "is the effort of 20 NYC music bloggers whose goal is to help new artists gain exposure while raising money for struggling school music programs.  After the Jump is teaming up with The Music Hall of Williamsburg and Galapagos Art Space for a festival stretching from noon until last call." There will be an outdoor stage also! Some featured bands are Ponytail, Power Douglas, Fiasco, The Shackeltons, Extra Life, The Austerity Program, Dinowalrus, Autrodrone, and Health.  Check out AftertheJumpFest.com for more info!  We'll be there with our cupcakes on!  

Some stuff on our menu today: 

• Fluffy coconut cupcakes
• Breezy Lemon cupcakes with lavender frosting
• Dark chocolate cupcakes with almond buttercream frosting
• Heart-stopping chocolate-orange brownies
• Chewy oatmeal-cinnamon-chocolate chip cookies

Come visit us! xo

Hiyo! ...is what Alicia always says when she sees you/text's you/emails you.  I miss her!  My bakester bud is away in Wisconsin, the wonderous place in which she learned all about pie crusts and chocolate fudge.  Did you know her grandma ran a zoo and a museum in her backyard?  Now THAT'S d.i.y. thinking!  

Anyway, I'm sitting here, figuring out menus for tomorrow, responding to the incredible amount of fan mail and requests for the Toothy Tiger's bangin' sweet treats, and eating a delicious homemade chocolate chip ice cream sandwich.  Yum.  

Ok, I'll stop a'ramblin and fill you in on the super sweet good news: on Wednesday, Sweet Tooth of the Tiger landed the front page of Daily Candy's New York savvy site, dailycandy.com.  It was like Daily Candy had sent some fireworks or smoke signals into the sky of NYC and for a minute everyone stopped and stared.  READ IT HERE!  We're very excited and are giving each other virtual hugs over the phone!

Also, take a look at the image above.  Do you see those adorable vintage recipe boxes?  Those bad boys are being used for a super rad project to be revealed this summer.. it involves artist designed recipe cards and a lil bit o' love... stay tuned.

In other news, we're psyched to have presented the bake sale at Light Industry in Sunset Park on Tuesday night, Brooklyn's new film space.  Sabrina Gschwandtner curated a program called "No Idle Hands," a group screening with various artists articulating their theories for the craft movement.  The program included a rad in-progress documentary about the new craft and d.i.y. revolution called "Handmade Nation" by Faythe Levine.  How exciting!

Tonight we'll be at Cinders gallery in Williamsburg.  Come check us out!  

xo Sweet Tooth

You arrive and I'm on Fire!

Hello!  We thought we'd list our menu items for the next week to tantalize your tastebuds in advance!

Menu: June 6-June 13

• Apricot Oat Bars
• Very Vanilla Birthday Cupcakes
• Snickerdoodles
• Jimmy Buffet's famous Lime Sugar Cookies
• Chocolate Chip Cookies (Gram's secret recipe)
• Chocolate Revel Bars
• Vanilla-Chocolate Ice Cream Sandwiches
• Killer Cereal Bars
• Sweet and Sassy Lemon Squares
• Sticky and Sweet Caramel Corn + Tutti Fruiti popcorn
• Summer Strawberry cupcakes

We will be offering these sweet little things Friday, June 6th (tomorrow) at McCaig-Welles gallery around 7pm, on Tuesday June 10th at Light Industry, and on Friday June 13th at Cinders Gallery.  Awesome!  Hope to see you there!

p.s. If we see you at the bake sale and you mention who wrote the title of this blog, a free baked good will be yours! 

Sweet Sweet digital ink

We have some sweet tooth'ed bloggers on our side !  We have already been tagged a few times online.  Check it out:

• Keith from FRED FLARE is our bud.  He came by our launch event at Secret Project Robot and gobbled up some cupcakes and cookies in his cute lil' multi-colored headphones.  Click here to read his blog post about us!
  

• WILLIAMSBURG IS DEAD wrote a few lines about how hip we are.  Check it.

• Our bud Suzanne writes a blog called FASHION SKOOL OF HARD KNOCKS and blogged about the Pink Elephant Projects exhibition opening that also served as our pre-launch.  View it here.

• And it all started with Nicole from BROOKLYN BASED who has a super rad blog about what to do in Brooklyn.  It's here.

Bake Sale Launch!

Hello!

This is the blog for all projects concerning Sweet Tooth of the Tiger, a renegade bake sale project that connects communities with sugar highs. Alicia and I are sitting in the garden of a newly opened bar/lounge called Franklin Park in the Prospect Heights neighb' of Brooklyn. After several weeks of grad finals, sickness, and icing induced hangovers, we are imbibing the summer sunshine and sharing new ideas for upcoming Sweet Tooth gigs. As we plan for the coming weeks, we're giggling over the experiences we had at the launch and pre-launch of Sweet Tooth and are appreciating all the love we felt from friends new and old that came out to support us and buy a cookie (or two). Just like sprinkles make a cupcake tasty, here are some highlights to sweeten your day:

This is the pre-launch event at Pink Elephant Projects in Brooklyn. The weather was terrible but the cookies were as sweet as ever!  The bake sale consisted of Not-Hostess Cupcakes (choco-marshmallow), Lemon Buttermilk cupcakes, Lime Sugar Cookies, Cinnamon/Oat/Choc-chip cookies, Rebel Bars (fudge-y oat bars), Chocolate Raspberry cupcakes, and Dark Chocolate Sour Cherry Cookies.  Megan Canning celebrated her first solo exhibition in NY with her rad embroidered canvases that depicted various organs of the digestive system. We were right next to her image of the tongue that showed the salty, sweet, bitter and sour taste-bud regions! Visitors to the exhibition opening loved the Sweet Tooth idea and devoured almost all of our baked goods! YUM.

Below is the second night of the Sweet Tooth project, the night of the LAUNCH at the ever-amazing Secret Project Robot in Brooklyn. On our way to the gallery, trucking along with our little red cart, distracted by the butterflies in our tummy and the ominous rain clouds in the sky, I totally bit the dust and tumbled over the little red cart, scraping my knees and toppling my basket of cupcakes. When we arrived at Secret Project Robot and unveiled the artificially flavored (but preservative free) fruit of our labors, we discovered THIS:

An idea was born! We had made WIPE-OUT CUPCAKES. Special of the day, one night only! People loved them, and the cupcakes were still deliciously tasty.

Some of our friends, with a penchant for poetry and a sweet song in their hearts submitted the following song lyrics to help us launch our renegade bakery with a rebel beat.

SWEET TOOTH of the TIGER (lyrics by Bryce Beemer)
Risin' up, back on the cookie sheet
Did my time in the ov-en
Went the distance, now I'm wrapped in plastic
Just a cookie that wants to be sold!

So many times, it happens too fast
You're burnt on the outside, raw in the center
Don't lose your grip on the dreams of the past
You must fight just to be baked up right.

Chorus:
It's the sweet tooth of the tiger, it's the tastiest treat
Risin' up to the challenge of our rivals
And the last unsold brownie is prey in the night
And you're startin' it down... like a sweet toothed tiger

This muffin's baked, out of the heat
It's great, are you hungry?
We stack them to sell on the street
We love to bake, its our skill to survive

(Chorus)

Risin' up, these cupcakes are done
Have the taste, got the frosting
Went the distance, now they're wrapped in plastic
We're simple bakers with a will to thrive!

(Chorus)

The sweet tooth of the tiger (repeats out)...

SWEET TOOTH of the TIGER BLUES (lyrics/music by Sean Kirkpatrick)

Gnawing on your floury flesh
Chips melting in my feline mouth
Your sweet corpse fills me with
Childhood dreams of the cookie hunt

(chorus)

Cookie in the jar'oh, cookie in the jar'oh
Caught me with my paws in your bowl
I love your sweet confections
Mama don't you spank me too hard...

Your brown sugar dissolves
like butter in my bowl
Cocoa princess, vanilla mama
You make this tiger growl

(Chorus)

Tigre tigre burning bright
in the kitchen of the night
Craving all your sweet delights
Your beater and your oven light

(Chorus)

Late night snack, crumbs in my bed
I've made a mess of you
Visions of my sugar mama
Make this big cat drool

(Chorus)

Alicia and I also had a fun night of photo-shoot madness a few days before the launch and pre-launch.  One of the images are up at the tippy-top of this blog post, a few others are below.

Stay tuned for more Sweet Tooth updates, recipes, and sugary giggles!  Check out our WEBSITE for our calendar of events and for more info.