Max and I have been sequestered in the house while potty training for almost two weeks now. It's going really well, knock on wood, but we're both getting a bit antsy and bored. Today we decided to make cupcakes. There's a new gourmet cupcake store in town called So Cupcake and I've been craving one of their beautiful and tasty creations for quite some time. At $2.50 each (ouch!), I figured Max and I could make our own. It couldn't be that hard, right? Heck, I make cupcakes all the time.
Max and I quickly baked up the cupcakes. This was the easy part. Next we moved on to the frosting. I let Max pick the color and he really wanted to make the frosting blue. Blue cupcakes? Well okay, why not?! I'll tell you why not. It's really hard to make blue icing look right. As hard as I tried it just came out purply-gray and sickly looking. In a last ditch effort I added some green food coloring and that just turned it a very unappetizing teal. I figured I'd better quit before it got worse, so we were stuck with teal frosting. Besides, the sprinkles would hide the odd color of the frosting, right?
So on we went to the decorations. I loaded the frosting into a pastry bag so we could get big beautiful swirls like they have at So Cupcake. Let me just tell you, it is harder than you'd guess to make the icing look professional. My arm was actually shaking! I'm blaming my pathetic frosting job on the pastry tip. Clearly that was the problem.
Next I let Max decorate with all different kinds of sprinkles. Oh boy! We ended up with more sprinkles on the floor than on the cupcakes. I kept chasing those dreadful little balls all around the kitchen with my broom. They may never all come up. After all was said and done my gourmet cupcakes look anything but gourmet. But what do you expect with a two year old for a sous chef?
Max was so excited when I told him he could eat a cupcake. With a mouthful of cake he sighed and said, "how wonderful," and then gave me a high five. Then he promptly stuck his beloved plastic dinosaur on the top of a cupcake and declared, "Dinosaur is climbing a mountain!" See, that's SO much better than any store bought cupcake, even if they are much more beautiful than mine.
