One thing I want to do more of in the new year is tell more stories. That is, write more stories, either on my blog or just on my own. They’ll be mostly stories about my life, but maybe fiction, too. Anything that has a beginning, middle and end will count.
Since I’m new at telling stories, they’ll undoubtedly be boring. Here’s the first one.
I like making cupcakes. At my office day job, I’ve become known as the person who bakes. I bring cupcakes whenever someone on my team has a birthday and I bake cookies, brownies and coffee cakes just for fun. My husband doesn’t eat sweets, so I’m excited to finally have eaters for my baked goods.
This past weekend I decided to make the birthday cupcakes with my friend, Ceece, who likes baking from scratch. I usually use a mix and a tub of frosting. Ceece and I opened her Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook from the 1930’s and found a recipe for “light, golden yellow cake.” We paired it with Ceece’s tried and true buttercream frosting, which she uses on her Christmas cookies every year.
We actually produced the lightest yellow cake I’ve ever managed to make. It was fluffy and delicious with that great home oven taste. Unfortunately, the Christmas cookie frosting was too heavy and sweet. There was no flavor contrast and the frosting overwhelmed the cake. In my opinion, and I am a cake-with-frosting connoisseur, it was sort of like a big blob of vanilla-sugar-too-much.
But they were still edible and the birthday girl was happy with them. However, I think many of my co-workers were suffering from post-holiday fatness since they didn’t eat as many of them as usual. I ended up taking the final six pastries to my dry cleaners. I did this because one day a few months ago, I found myself in the similar position of having two cupcakes left over at the end of a workday. I had some dry cleaning to pick up and the elderly gentleman who works there was happy to take those cupcakes off my hands. This time his wife was also there, so they each got two. I ate the last two myself that night (frosting scraped off).
Ceece and I are now on a mission to try to create the perfect cupcake. I’ll let you know how it goes.