Success

Dudes, I am so over this "June gloom" crap. If it's gonna be cloudy, at least rain and make it interesting! Luckily today it did just that, I even caught some thunder and lightning! It was pretty chilly too, so Lula spent a good portion of the day like this:

Dear Lula: You are a delight.

Yesterday I went over to Rachel's and we made even more cupcakes. Chocolate with fresh berries on top, chocolate mint with mint icing and chocolate ganache, and some peanut butter and jelly muffins for Emmett. The chocolate mint ones made me really sad - in the picture, the icing was all fluffy and perfect, but the finished product turned out absolutely nothing like that, even after we refrigerated it for quite some time. Not the worst thing to ever happen, they were still delish, but the photo in the cookbook was totally misleading!!

Today on the way home from work, I realized that after making 60 cupcakes in less than 24 hours, I had none to go home to and well, that will never do, so I picked up some more red food coloring at Ralph's and tried the red velvet again. Success!!!! They rose perfectly and did not sink in the middle and aren't mushy like the last batch, so that was really exciting. I found a pastry bag yesterday at Gelson's and was super excited to try it, but it ended up being pretty anti-climactic and honestly, I'm not sure I'll use this one again. The frosting all gets stuck in the weird tip and you can't squeeze it out, and when you do it just doesn't look like its supposed to look. I suspect because the bag and plastic tips were only $5, but hey I'll try anything for only $5!! Dear $5 pastry bag from Gelson's - I'm sorry things didn't work out, but it's not you, it's me. I have higher expectations of my pastry bags, maybe some day we will meet again but for now you will find a comfy home in the back of the far cabinet. Sorry. I suppose I should start looking on Amazon for a nicer pastry bag, probably one with a set of metal tips instead of cheapy plastic. Oh well, it was a good experiment!

Oh, and one more thing - if you have one of those ice cream scoopers with the trigger (like this one), use it for cupcakes!! I picked one up today and it's the perfect amount to fill a cupcake liner, I can't believe I've been using crappy spoons for this long!! Anyway, I'm going to go hang out with this little monster now.

I'm still not sure I want to write about cupcakes all the time, so if you have any ideas or topics or burning questions what have you, I'm open to suggestions, just leave me a comment!