Cupcakes

Let me ask you a serious question: have you EVER seen an uglier cupcake than this one??








What would you say if you worked at a daycare and two proud parents walked in with a whole box of these gems? Could you even contain your laughter?

Well, fortunately, this was only a "draft," and we came up with something, err... dare I say, better.

I was always a little envious of the kids in school whose mothers served as "room moms" or would bring in all kinds of treats for little Jimmy's birthday. That wasn't an option for my mother. She worked full-time, at a school an hour away from my own. I know she always wished she could be our class's guests of honor for my birthday, but it just never worked out. Since then, I've been waiting with great anticipation for the day that I could bring in my baked goods to school to celebrate our child's birthday.

Now, don't get me wrong. I had no illusions here that we were the guests of honor at Jonas' birthday party at daycare. I was just over the moon to be able to see him in action and to bring something special for him and his little buddies to share.

Cupcakes were the way to go. I had envisioned something like a "friendly alien" as a motif. Don't ask why. I just think they're cute. So, I asked Joe to come up with a simple design. The catastrophe above is the translation of his drawing with our store-bought "decorator's frosting".

The thing is, we started out well.


Here are our "funfetti" cupcakes. Nice and lofty.





The genius amongst the two of us thought it would be good to do a few "practice runs". We used a plate and a piece of bread.


You can see that it was not looking good, but we tried it on a cupcake anyway. We ended up eating it. Correction--*I* ended up eating it.




So, we decided that we'd better come up with something else, something that wouldn't make Jonas the laughing stock amongst his 2- and 3-yr old friends for the rest of his childhood.

Yes, I know it's kind of sad. But this is the best we could come up with in spite of our doodling and internet searches. The latter produced all these super-mom blogs with gourmet cupcakes that would take us a WEEK to do. And I mean it'd take us a week to do just ONE cupcake!

Gourmet, these are not. But they're from the heart, and Joe and I laughed so hard while making them.

I "fashioned" the eyes and smile. Joe topped it off with the "confetti hair."



Here they are, in all their glory, just waiting to be devoured by a dozen children aged 1-5, who couldn't give two figs what the design is on the silly cupcake.

It took us hours to do these cupcakes between the baking, researching and sketching. Once in the hands of kids, they vanished in 2 minutes.