January 2012 – Rebel Prince

My blog is now ten years old. Wow. I started it on a Gateway laptop when I was twenty-five years old and living in Washington, D.C. In other words, in a previous life.

In the beginning

Though my first blog post was written in 2002, I registered the domain rebelprince.com and put up a small website in September 2001. It was a place for a few personal pictures and I would update it weekly with stuff that was going on with me, basically for friends and family. Not quite a blog; more like a newsletter.

The Rebel Prince domain name was inspired by the Rufus Wainwright song, as those years were the height of my Rufus fandom. I still love him now, but at the time he and my fellow Rufus peeps were pretty much the center of my leisure universe: reading the message board, following the Poses tour, etc. It was never a dedicated fan site per se, but I just loved the song so much that it stuck. I later moved the site to jefftabaco.com and intended to change the blog name, but I still find Rebel Prince endearing. So it stays, for now.

Little boxes

I would link to the very first entry, dated January 25, 2002, but as I’ve migrated this blog through three publishing platforms and two domains over the years, like physical moves there is still a lot of stuff in boxes. Back in the day I started on Blogger, and at the time their system did not have separate fields for post titles. (They didn’t have a built-in commenting system either. Imagine that!) I got into the habit of writing daily blog posts made up of unrelated blurbs and made my own subheadings.

Fast forward a few years to Movable Type. I migrated my posts to the new system, which now had title fields. So I had some clean-up to do for these old posts. Over time I started either breaking them up into separate posts or just giving them the same title as the first blurb. In any case now here we are now on WordPress, which I love, and I still have several months of posts in boxes as it were. I’ll get to them someday.

Thank you

Thank you, dear readers, for, well, … reading. Especially you old-school bloggers who have become friends over the years. No doubt I’m blogging less thanks to Facebook and Twitter, but there’s nothing like a blank, open page to get the imagination going. I do love my own little patch of Internet.

On the baking front, we now take a break from pies and go to cupcakes! For Christmas our friends got us The Butch Bakery Cookbook by David Arrick, the guy behind Butch Bakery in New York. Their thing is “manly” cupcakes, no pink, no frills, just big, bold cupcakes. (Most with alcohol. All righty!)

These friends were having a New Year’s Eve party so I thought it would be neat if we made something from the book. I went through it and found the Mojito: rum-soaked lime cupcake with muddled minty lime cream cheese frosting. We happened to have lots of limes on hand, so this was perfect.

They were pretty straightforward to make, and tasted super yummy. There is lime juice and lime zest in the cupcake, and lime zest in the frosting and sprinkled on top, so yes, it is quite tart. And lots of sugar, so sweet.

The only strange thing was the yield: the recipe is supposed to make twelve jumbo cupcakes, but I only got ten, with the cups filled about only halfway with batter (the recipe actually calls for filling them two-thirds full). There was a lot of frosting left over, so the other day I made another batch of the cupcakes. This time I started filling the cups two-thirds full and ended up with only six cupcakes. They were big and great, but still, only six.

In any case, they were a hit at the party, and we look forward to going through the book and trying them all!