cupcakes

H's 5th birthday is on Sunday. H's 5th birthday party is on Saturday. H will be bringing cupcakes to school on Friday. By my calculations, that is at least 60 cupcakes.

My mother, shape birthday cake maker extraordinaire, making cakes in a variety of shapes (from scratch, please) with the greatest of ease, got me a book about cupcakes for Christmas. Of course she did. But its a great book. Hello Cupcake! by Alan Richardson and Karen Tack. It says "With just a handful of candies, a can of frosting, a ziplock bag and some cupcake batter, you are on your way to having fun..." It is an awesome book, very fun, and has a lot of great tips to make cool things with icing. I have already used a lot of the tips in this book on cookies I made at valentines day. Books like this are dangerous for me, though. I have been conditioned not to use other peoples ideas, making it hard for me to follow a recipe or a pattern, but impossible to follow a cupcake design. (With the possible exception on the cupcakes made to look like Van Gogh's Starry Night.) This means I must reinvent the cupcake wheel. But, there are a lot of tools in this book to do just that. Its exciting.

I left the book out last night, and H found it this morning and was flipping through it. I was afraid. She wanted alien penguin baby cupcakes. I managed to convince her that we would make her own unique special to her cupcakes. She relented. I didn't even have to go into my prepared spiel that she should deal with her mothers issues with plagiarism, and the fact that her mother doesn't get into the studio enough and must now exorcise her creative demons on cupcakes. The cupcakes need to be purple and red with flowers. I can do that! I may even attempt butterflies. I bought some candy to use as decorations, and ate a lot of it. I have frosting dye... I'm ready!

With so many cupcake creations before me, a daughter who gets as excited about making things out of food as I do, an inability (perhaps genetic) to resist a cake challenge. I'm hoping the outcome is 60 cool cupcakes, but a little fearful it will be a tired freaked out me on a sugar high.