I first hit upon the idea to make s’mores cupcakes when the marshmallows I put in my last cupcakes melted into oblivion. It would take a little ingenuity, but it was doable, I thought: graham cracker cupcakes flecked with chocolate chips and topped by frothy marshmallow frosting. It would be marvelous.

When Cheryl of Cupcake Bakeshop and Garrett of Vanilla Garlic announced a creative cupcake event, my thoughts went immediately to my mythic dessert of my imagination. My first step was to find a recipe for vanilla cupcakes and doctor it into something grahamier. Chockylit’s recipes have always served me well, so I picked one from her website that served her well, the Vanilla Cupcakes from The Magnolia Bakery Cookbook. I crushed graham crackers, sifted the crumbs, and substituted them for most of the flour, hoping for the best.

And so I followed the traditional steps, whisking together dry ingredients . . .

. . . beating together butter, eggs, and sugar . . .

. . . combining the two into cupcake batter . . .

. . . adding in the chocolate chips . . .

. . . and baking it in cupcake liners.

The next step was the marshmallow frosting. I’ve made marshmallows before, but I was a little leery of using the same recipe for frosting. I did a little research and decided on Martha Stewart’s recipe for Snowball Frosting, which I found on 52 Cupcakes. The Cupcake Queen reported some frustrations with the process, but I was confident that I could learn from her mistakes. For example, she hit one snag when she realized she was supposed to beat the egg whites while simultaneously boiling the sugar, meaning that she had to run back and forth across her kitchen. I solved this problem easily, by virtue of my superior gadgetry.

While my Kitchenaid whipped my egg whites into stiff peaks without my supervision . . .

. . . my sugar boiled away under the watchful eye of my new candy thermometer, which helpfully beeped when it had reached the appropriate temperature. This was the first time I had occasion to use yet another wonderful gift that I got this Christmas, arguably the highest tech. It’s a hell of a lot better than maintaining a bowl of ice water next to the sugar and hovering over it like a mother hen.

When both components were at their respective peaks, I poured the sugar mixture into the egg whites while still beating them. The result was a light, fluffy substance that tasted distinctly of marshmallows.

I spooned it over the cupcakes and, since the frosting was still pretty gooey, let them dry until the surface of the frosting formed a film that was still tacky but much neater.

So how were they, my beautiful cupcake creations? Well, I got some very mixed reviews. My dad loved them, calling them even better than a normal s’mores. One boor at work called them weird and refused to elaborate, while another more tactful coworker said they were good but still disappointing. Yet another coworker praised them enthusiastically, saying that she could eat a whole batch. My mom liked them in general but said there was something off about them.

And me? Well, they were yummy, but not what I expected. The frosting was as marshmallowy as I expected, and chocolate is chocolate, but there was something — some things — wrong with the cupcake. First of all, about half of it stuck to the liner paper. I think I need to get my hands on some nonstick cupcake liners, or else find a good way to grease regular ones. Also, the chocolate chips sunk through the batter to the bottom, meaning that they stuck to the paper more than anything else. I’ve thought of a couple remedies for that: smaller, lighter chips, adding the chips after the cupcakes have started to cook, or even bypassing the chips entirely and inserting the chocolate as a filling instead. The final and most egregious problem was with the quality of the cupcake itself. It just didn’t taste like graham cracker. It actually reminded me more of a blondie, that bastard half-sibling of the brownie. I’d try leaving out the vanilla and reducing the sugar, since the graham crackers already have sugar in them.

So while not an unqualified success, the s’mores cupcakes are definitely worth a little effort. I’m confident that with a little tweaking, s’mores cupcakes will enter the cupcake hall of fame as one of the all-time cupcake greats.

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So the Golden Globes happened recently. People won stuff, but more importantly, people wore stuff. Penelope Cruz, for example, wore this:

This dress landed her on a lot of best-dressed lists, and I’m not sure why. I mean, I can see what she was going for: elegant, old Hollywood glamour feminized by airy frills. It just doesn’t work for me, and I end up thinking of Scarlett O’Hara climbing over the bazaar booth to dance in her mourning weeds with the scandalous Rhett Butler.

What I’m getting at is that this dress is in many ways analogous to the eggplant soup I made recently.

The soup, which I adapted from a recipe on Epicurious, was well-reviewed, although that wasn’t what initially drew me to it. It was very easy to make, involving a slow oven roast followed by a gentle simmer and finished off with a blender-aided emulsification that turns it into liquid velvet. The bold, fruity flavors of the thick soup should have been checked by the feta’s tanginess, transforming it into something greater than the sum of its parts.

I don’t know. Maybe I just wasn’t in the mood for soup. It was bold and fruity, yes, but maybe too bold, too fruity. Like a headdress on a llama, the feta was perched atop what seemed perilously close to sludge without seeming to have anything to do with the rest of it. The eggplant, which I had relied on to impart velutinous characteristics, had all but disappeared. It wasn’t exactly bad, and since I was hungry, I did eat most of it. Instead, like the prose of Gertrude Stein, the soup simply bored me.

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Okay, so this time I know it wasn’t anything I did. It tastes fantastic. It’s moist and sweet and rich and, oh yeah, denser than pound cake. It’s so dense that it’s almost raw in the middle, and this, for once, is not my fault.

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