I have been in full-on Martha Stewart mode the past few weeks. I have managed to annoy everyone with it, including myself. That's why it hasn't bothered me as countless people have proclaimed, "I hate you," to my face.
It's all good. I deserve to be hated.
This is the first of a few Martha-esque posts. It is the one about . . . drumroll please . . . The Magical Cupcakes.
It's a thing I do precisely once per year. I save up all of my baking and decorating energy for exactly one project. I create over-the-top and ridiculously complicated cupcakes for Alexis to take to school to share with her classmates. Here's the history:
2nd Birthday
3rd Birthday
4th BirthdayIn retrospect, I think the pandas win for most complicated and ridiculous cupcake. Of course, thinking that one year stood out is pretty much an invitation for the next version to suck harder.
And it did.
The lesson I learned this year is that I cannot have Alexis in the room with me when I'm scouring the internet for cupcake ideas. She will look over my shoulder and decide that I'm making something that is far more complicated than anything that I would have picked out on my own. And if I'm looking at Bakerella? The kid can't even be in the same zip code as me.
Alexis decided I should make Hello Kitty cake pops.
The bigger lesson I have learned is that I absolutely positively cannot start on The Magical Cupcakes early. I did this year and it came back to bite me in the ass. First, I managed to burn an entire pound of melted white chocolate. That requires skill, in case you didn't know. The next night I managed to engage in a fist fight of sorts with a second pound of melted white chocolate. It beat the crap out of me, even managing to throw me out of the ring. In fact, I had given up on the Hello Kitty cake pops when the white chocolate suddenly started mocking me and laughing about how it was all in my head and HEY, LOOK! The melted white chocolate is the exact right consistency now!
Or something.
Then I managed to get in a fight with the edible black marker. For the record, if you fight with a marker, the marker will win. But! I totally kicked the marker to the curb and carried on without it NEENER NEENER.
Once I was basically out of time, the cake pops flew together pretty quickly. I should have just procrastinated until then and avoided all of the white chocolate/marker/baby mama drama.
Anyway, this year's entry into The Magical Cupcake history books is:
(Hello Kitty's whiskers decided to go search for her mouth, so SHOOSH. I don't want to hear it. I also don't want to hear about how the one Hello Kitty looks like she got her ear caught in Mike Tyson's mouth. SHE'S SPECIAL, DAMMIT.)
While I'm busy confessing that cupcakes can make me look bad, I should probably admit that in my fury over the edible marker working on any substance on earth EXCEPT the white chocolate, I might have taken a permanent marker to one of the cake pops as a form of I'M THE BOSS, DAMMIT.
I didn't make anyone consume Sharpie ink, but I did consider it. Hello Kitty just looks better when her whiskers are visible to the human eye.
(Psst . . . you probably shouldn't eat that cake pop in my fridge, unless you are curious if Sharpies taste as good as they smell.) (They don't.)