…But were afraid to ask.
“Some people like to paint pictures, or do gardening, or build a boat in the basement. Other people get a tremendous pleasure out of the kitchen, because cooking is just as creative and imaginative an activity as drawing, or wood carving, or music.” -Julia Child
To start… no, Cupcake Rehab is not like Celebrity Rehab.
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There are no washed-up whiny celebrities on this blog. There are no celebrities at all actually, except me (yes, I am quite the celeb), and I do not have a substance abuse problem. A flour and refined sugar problem, sure. I’m a (late) twenty-something of 28 (going on 80 at times), a New Yorker born and raised. I’m a typical “city girl” who prefers subways and 5th Avenue, Prince Street and Little Italy, and all the sounds of Manhattan to the quiet suburban life, but in my “old age” I’ve become mellower and learned to enjoy the results of a day of work in the kitchen as opposed to an evening of bar hopping in the East Village. But just because I’m domestic doesn’t mean I’m domesticated. I absolutely love to cook & bake, and yeah, I sew & get crafty at times too, but I’m a better baker than seamstress. I have eclectic musical tastes that range from punk & pop-punk, to rap & hip-hop, to rockabilly & psychobilly, to blues & country, to metal & rock and all the way to classical & operatic (I love Mozart, and dig heavily on some Beethoven & Debussy), so please don’t try and put me in a category. I’m me.
“She’s a rebel, she’s a saint, she’s the salt of the earth & she’s dangerous.”
I’ve been in a relationship with my musical police officer Jay for almost 7 years now (despite our differing musical tastes- he likes death metal & southern rock…?) & I love him to bits. He’s a good egg, he’s my best friend, and he’s the one responsible for this website existing in the first place (more on that later). I’m really thankful I have him to bounce ideas off of, and it’s fun to force him to eat all these sweets I make, too. I have a black cat who I treat like a child named Arwyn (LOTR reference FTW! But no, I’m not a Tolkien fan, sorry… just liked the name) and me and Jay have a puppy 95 lb. dog named Indy, a Labrador Retriever/Staffordshire Bull Terrier/English Coonhound mix, who we also treat like a child. Animal cruelty and people who hate animals make me cringe, however I readily admit… I hate most people.
Oh! And I wish I was a vampire. For real. Not in a cheesy, overly-romanticized Twilight/True Blood-fangirl type way (not that there’s anything wrong with those, I enjoy them). But I mean in a serious, skull-crushing, mass slaughtering, realistic kinda way. Don’t be frightened of me. I’m really normal. Well. I mean, what’s really normal anyway? Angelina Jolie once said, “When other little girls wanted to be ballet dancers I kind of wanted to be a vampire.” Well, me? I wanted to be a vampire ballerina. Sort of a kick-your-ass-and-then-do-a-pas-de-bourrée-across-your-face kinda deal.
Me, my two-tone hair & my custom cupcake pouch made by Yoyo @ TOPSTITCH (buy your own here)
About my life, well… where to begin? I won’t bore you with the minute details of my young life, where I whiled away the days working my ass off in three to four dance classes a week (ballet, tap & jazz), drawing mermaids and gymnasts, creating fashion designs that would put Bob Mackie and Jean Paul Gaultier to shame, and creating large involved vignettes in Barbie-scale (complete with water filled swimming pools and horse stables with riders and bales of hay) on my mother’s living room floor that were NOT to be touched or disturbed under any circumstances. Nor will I bore you with how intelligent I was deemed to be at a very young age, how I practically came out of the womb with a book in my hand, how I was doing book reports in Kindergarten because I was bored with the regular curriculum or how I wrote off a kid in the first grade for being so dumb as to think that when I mentioned The Beatles I meant something so common as bugs. So lets just leave it at this: I was an A+ student for the majority of my life save for math (I still don’t have a clue how to do long division), attended an all-girls Catholic high school (SHA YES! I can still sing the school song too) where I learned most religious philosophy is hate-mongering fear-provoking nonsense, when men aren’t around for awhile you really just don’t miss them and that high school really is some of the best years of your life, and then I went on to F.I.T. where I learned that trans-gender individuals often dress better than actual women, those who can’t do teach (well save for a select few who were pretty stellar- Dessa Kallos, Dave DeVries, Karen Santry and Chris Spollen) and that you can’t really grade art.
I won’t bore you with how I’ve been on the cover of a magazine with my mom when I was 9, how I had my artwork published in a magazine (I illustrated pictures for an article) when I was 12 and have just been generally fabulous since birth. I definitely won’t bore you with a list of my many accomplishments; you’d just think I was lying anyway. I won’t tell you how I’ve always been an individual and a hell-raiser, like for instance that me and my friends were literally “The Rebels of the Sacred Heart” in high school because we had short spiked multi-colored hair, wore spike bracelets and black nail polish with our spiffy little uniforms and terrorized the “popular” girls or how me and a friend once wrote a lyric from a TSOL song on the uniform blazer of another friend, unbeknownst to her, and she had to stand up and speak to one of the Spanish teachers with said lyric in plain sight, much to his disgust and confusion. Nor will I tell you how in junior year of high school me and my best friend were referred to as “the two scariest people I’ve ever seen” by a girl who apparently never went to nor heard of East New York or Bed-Stuy. I wasn’t scary- I was artsy.
Sorry, I guess I did bore you with all that after all.
So yeah, I’m not a baker- by trade I’m an artist who went to school for fashion design & illustration, I also do webdesign and graphic design, & have a crafty/fashion/randomness blog that talks more about that over at: mariloca.com. I have an extensive art background. I’ve been drawing and painting since I was a child and about 6 years ago I got into digital art (drawn with Adobe Illustrator). When I was 17 years old I interned in the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, NY- one of the most famous museums in the world. In addition to fashion design and illustration, which I was schooled for, I’ve done graphic design and taught myself webdesign. I’ve been doing webdesign for 10 years now, and I’ve come a long way since my first free website on Angelfire.com. I also have a cooking group/blog with a few high school friends called Cooking the Books, and I did the design and HTML work for that as well. Check us out!
Examples of my digital art/graphic design work. On the left & middle: logos for this website…
on the right: a logo done for Cupcake Hero- http://cupcakehero.com
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above: 3 more logos I created for this site. Click here, here & here to view full-size.
(all work © mariloca.com/cupcakerehab.com, now-infinity… don’t be a dick & steal it, I’ll find you & embarrass you to death)
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I have a nose ring and yes, sometimes it does get annoying when I have to blow my nose. That question gets annoying after a while too… as do the “Did it hurt?” and the “Why would you do that?” questions. I find “Well, it hurt less than looking at you does” and “I don’t know, why are you such an asshole?” to be appropriate responses. I also like changing my hair color and style, and my favorite question to hear after making a drastic change is “Did you dye your hair?” No, I woke up today and found that the hair fairy had paid me a visit overnight. Seriously, are people that stupid? As you can see above and below, I’ve had numerous hair colors and styles since the opening of this blog. If you’re curious, the most recent is the color at the very top of this page- a white/platinum/lavender colored bob with bangs.
Because I change my appearance (namely my hair) quite often, I’ve left these photos up. Clockwise from far left: September 2008, November 2008, April 2008 and July 2009. Obviously, I like variety. But apparently not when it comes to my poses…? Wow, Tyra needs to give me an America’s Next Top Model posing lesson. And no… I’m not vain at all, what would make you say that?
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The main thing I’ve learned in my fairly short life so far is that you really can’t care what anyone else thinks about you. I certainly don’t. For better or worse, this is who I am. Take it or leave it. I curse, I swear, I make light of things that may not be funny to you, I’m irreverent and sometimes a bit self-centered … but the beauty of all this is that you can click that little “x” up in the corner and never come back here again, and I can continue to be brash and abrasive and honest. A friend of mine had this to say about this blog:
” I love it … it’s like Martha Stewart and Sid Vicious had a blog love child.”
Just because everything here is pink or purple and cupcake-y doesn’t mean its all flowers and sunshine… but it doesn’t mean I make cupcakes with mohawks and spikes coming out of them either. Maybe I’m not the typical “baker/cook/housewifey type”… maybe when you think of someone who’s good in the kitchen and gets excited over KitchenAid appliance attachments, you don’t envision someone like me. But theres a lot of that going around (just check out my links over there to the left- you’ll see). No longer are women repressed by these things, no longer are these things looked at as “anti-feminist” or uncool. Now women are rockin’ out to Bad Religion while knitting, or while making 3 dozen cupcakes for their kids bake sale and mentally planning their next tattoo. So actually, maybe I am indicative of whats typical. And thats pretty awesome. I’d rather have a bunch of confident empowered women in their kitchens making good food for their families to eat as my peers, than a bunch of insecure little girls running around in heels with briefcases trying to impress people and break the glass ceiling, while neglecting their kids and wondering why they have dysfunctional lives. Not that women in the workforce is bad, not that working moms are bad, and not that you can’t be a cool working mom who bakes… I mean, I’ve been a 9-5′er myself… but homemakers have been put down for so long I’m happy to see things turning around.
My mom is the reason I love being a cook and baker. From her I learned (almost) everything I know, and I still ask her advice and help for recipes when I’m a bit lost. From homemade sugar cookies and pfeffernüsse to regular day to day meals and cupcakes for my birthday at school, she was always making something. So its all because of her… and of course some inspiration from some other amazing cupcake and food blogs on the net that gave me the kick in the ass to create Cupcake Rehab. Thanks Mom ♥
I am NOT a vegan (or vegetarian), so my recipes are not vegan-friendly. But its easy enough to convert them if you’re into that sort of thing. And if you are; more power to you. Its just that I’m not. I like butter too much. And surely we can agree to disagree, right? I am working on some gluten-free recipes, however. I have one or two up currently and will be adding more as I find them/taste test them. I try and cook organic whenever I can, but I don’t specifically mention it, because I know organic food can be expensive and I don’t want people to feel like they have to use all organic ingredients to make anything I post. Baking and cooking should be about fun and enjoyment, not stressing over whether you bought the right organic bananas. I enjoy a glass of wine or a beer every now and then, so I cook with it occasionally as well.
I love baking and cooking, it relaxes me and gives me something constructive to do. I’m also just really into anything creative so its an excuse for me to play with food! I’m not a pro, I never went to school for it, and I’m not making anything groundbreaking, but I hope at least someone will get something out of this. I started an informal blog in September of 2007, and created a blog at wordpress.com in December of 2007. By February 2008 I’d gotten over 3,000 hits, which encouraged me to take it a few steps further. The domain name was purchased courtesy of Jay and here we are. I’ve recently added some Cupcake Rehab© clothing and other miscellaneous items, so if you’re interested in that visit my store! *(Pssst… If you buy something, send me a picture of you wearing it… or using it… and I’ll post it on the C.R.my page!)
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Beware.. my Twitter is completely uncensored… and I’m VERY opinionated. Follow at your own risk.
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The rest, as they say, is history…
Psst… as far as those pose-y cutesy apron pictures, I’m not that glamorous & cool all the time. Usually you can find me in my glasses with frosting smeared on my cheek, and batter all over my clothes, or geeking out on my (pink Dell) laptop. But I can kick your ass either way.
If you’re interested in my cupcakes or baked goods for parties or other events, and live on Long Island in New York, you can e·mail me at cupcake.rehab@gmail.com for pricing and more information.
If you’re interested in graphic design/webdesign or illustration, you can contact me at marilloca@gmail.com or visit mariloca.com and see some of my work. I create websites from scratch without using programs and do digital and traditional illustration as well as logo design. Shoot me an e·mail for any indepth questions.
