Breaking My Back

Not just to know your name, but to bake cupcakes. heh.

I mentioned earlier that I signed up to bring cupcakes to the potluck we’re having at work tomorrow. I had this whole elaborate beautiful cupcake thing planned and it did not pan out as expected. But that’s okay. I’m not sure how the chocolate cupcakes will go over – I can’t judge chocolate cakey stuff because I don’t like it myself. So the two that I tried tasted icky anyway. Moist though!

Anyway, I stopped by the grocery store after work and picked up some cake mixes. I looked at their measly selection of decorations and figured Hobby Lobby would definitely be a better place to go for them. (Or any craft store, Hobby Lobby just happened to be closest.) Their selection of decorations was also measly if you weren’t planning a birthday party for a kid. I am weak though and bought new cupcake pans because these have lids! Now that I seem to be making a bit of a habit of bringing cupcakes to work, I thought this was a good investment. Also, I bought a mini cupcake pan because I could not resist the cuteness. I tried. Okay, maybe not very hard, but I did try. As I was leaving Hobby Lobby I realized that I tend to justify craft supply purchases without batting an eye. I can’t do that with clothes or shoes or DVDs or anything, but yes, I will spend money on craft supplies I don’t really need because… I’m not sure why. I mean, I do, but I’m too tired to try to put it into words at the moment. (Just there, I couldn’t readily remember the phrase “put it into words” so I really shouldn’t be writing this anyway right now, but CUPCAKES!)

Here’s what I started with (again, please ignore my roommate’s giant martini glass full of breath freshening agents):

I bought a bag (actually, two) of mini M&Ms with the intention of making cookies with them, but realized, after I left Hobby Lobby with no decorations, that they could just be used as decorations on the cupcakes. But only the blue and red ones. So I decided to pick them all out, because I do things like that. Here are the cute mini M&Ms enjoying their diversity:

And after less time than I expected it would have taken, here they are with all the retro colors crammed together in the ghetto whilst the blue and the red are enjoying their spacious aristocratic neighborhoods. (I said I was tired, I can’t be blamed for ridiculous analogies at the moment.)

I wound up not using that many M&Ms anyway, and would be tempted to call the time spent separating them wasted, except that I found the tiniest M&M ever in the process, which made it okay. It even has its own M!

For the record, it tasted just like a regular one.

The beginnings of my cupcake army:

Preparing for invasion. This isn’t all of them – I had a few that I tossed due to improper baking/dropping/smooshed-ness and also there’s about a dozen or so on the other side of the kitchen getting iced already.

Flag of mini-cupcakes. Blue icing is regular vanilla on top of chocolate cupcakes; dark pink (which unfortunately wouldn’t get to the dark red I wanted) is strawberry icing on top of white cupcakes (totally yummy); and the white is cream cheese icing on top of carrot cupcakes. I was tempted to whip up a batch of icing myself and put white stars (but not cream cheese white stars) on the blue cupcakes here, but I nixed the idea for several reasons.

The whole shebang. Note the time on the stove, 11:45! And it wasn’t nearly as spectacular as I wish it would have been. Oh well.

Close up of the pan of cupcakes on the left which is going to go with me to my mom’s on Saturday – the light pink icing here is what the dark pink started out as – I put it on the four cupcakes that I marbled, using the chocolate and white batters. That was fun. Also, I ran out of cream cheese icing so there are three carrot cupcakes here that are not iced.

I like how the mini cupcakes sort of arranged themselves here with there being the vague tetris shapes hidden among them.

They should be tasty and that’s what counts.

I was going to do a cutesy cupcake to wish everyone a Happy 4th of July and one to wish everyone a Happy Canada Day but after 4.5 hours I couldn’t be bothered.

So instead, Happy North American Patriotism week everyone!