Friday, August 1, 2008

Blue Cupcakes


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.


1 comment:

Tonya said...

I love stories like this. You are such a cute mom! Enjoy it while it lasts. Soon they will grow up and not like you so much. I will have to check out the "so cupcake" shop if for no other reason to get some ideas it sounds fun. Please pass along the address so we can check it out...oh and you should check out this link. www.qvc.com and look for the gourmet girl cupcake maker. It is along the lines of an easy bake oven, but no cooking, you use your microwave. Anyway, I bought one for Abbey's birthday next month. My neighbor has one and says it's wonderful and that the mixes are good, but you can use store mixes too.