Wednesday, September 3, 2008

My babies are 9!

Yes, they'll always be my babies.  Here are some pictures I just took of them and the cupcakes I slaved on last night.  I was up till midnight making these things.  I think they are kinda groovy.

This is Ryan.  Don't mind the mess.  He's at the homework table and the shelves behind him house school supplies and all the paper junk they bring home.  He's currently eating a cupcake - which is a huge deal.  He's only been able to eat cupcakes for a couple of years.  This is the first year he's really eaten the whole thing and not just a tiny lick or a few bites.  Hooray!

This is Jake and his more serious pose.  You'll get the silly one next.  Notice in the background the outdoor table and chairs.  If you look closely you'll see one black chair with a black floral cushion.  The other chair and the table are beige.  This is my summer (now turned winter) project.  I'm supposed to be refinishing them.  The original is beige - with lots of rust.  The black is the makeover.  It'll be nice once I start working on it and get it done.  I'll take a better picture at that time.

This is the silly picture.  Jake has no problem with cupcakes.  He's gleefully cramming one in.  Again, don't mind the mess.  But do note the recliner in the background.  Yes, that's my sleeping/recovery recliner.  Wedged right in between the corner windows.  That's good sleeping!

These are the tie-dye cupcakes leftover from school.  Pretty cool, huh?  One tip, if you make 72 cupcakes, 9 little tubes of gel icing are not enough.  I would go with 15+.  I'm just guessing, because I only decorated 60 cupcakes and ran out.  At least 20 of those were decorated conservatively.  You can find the instructions on the family fun website, but here's how you decorate:  Make concentric circles of different colored gel icing and drag a toothpick (lightly) from either the center out or from out to in.  Center out looks more like tie-dye, out to in looks more like a flower.  I just so happened to have photographed both.  Wipe the toothpick clean between each drag.  This gets a little sticky/messy.  For the cake part, I made boxed cake mix, yellow, and stirred in a little bottle of colored non-pareils (sprinkle balls).  My tip for this - stir sparingly.  They melt very fast, and the more you stir the more the colors get muddled and the batter turns a purpley-brown.  Yuk.  I've seen online where people have separated bowls of batter and colored them and put blobs of different colors in the muffin cups.  Very cute.  Just google tie-dye cupcakes.  Lots of ideas out there.

Oh, the cupcake disaster.  Isn't there always one?  So I cleared out a shelf in the frig for the first batch of cupcakes.  I, mistakenly, put them in there without a lid.  They were on the middle shelf.   You can feel the disaster coming, can't you?  On the top shelf is the water pitcher thingy.  It's long and short and has a spigot that hangs over the edge.  I anticipated some drips so I put a ziplock baggie over the spigot.  Well, at one point I reach into the frig and somehow I notice water is pouring out of the spigot, filling up the baggie.  I'm panicking.  It's not easy stopping the flow, saving the cupcakes and figuring out what to do with the baggie all at the same time!  Water did get into the cupcake container, but I only had to take out 6.  Which is nothing compared to how much I had to bake.  Total disaster averted.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Ha Ha Ha on the "if you make 72 cupcakes."  Uhm, that won't be happening.

As per your comment on my blog. I am an Atheist, but have often sort of swung slightly over to the other side(denial on my part) hoping my Mom would have the heaven she wanted & that my parents would meet up one day.  I even pray(very rarely lately) because my Mother did & it makes me feel closer to her....

Anonymous said...

Happy Bday to the boys! They are so handsome! Love the way the cupcakes came out. 72 of 'em?? WOW!
Have a good weekend.
Pam