Sexy Bookworm Blogger: 911 On Standby...I'm Making Cupcakes!

My mom came to town a few weeks ago and while here, we visited the cutest cupcake bakery aptly named The Cupcakery. Twice. $54.21 later, I became addicted to the delectable little treats. While out shopping, I bought a "Cupcakes Make Me Smile" t-shirt and cupcake recipe book. I was hooked and the cupcake addition to the dream candy store I want to one day operate, One Sweet MoFu, was born. Now I just had to learn to bake.

First Step: the grocery store for ingredient. I decided to make mini cupcakes because tiny things make me happy and, in a more strategic point, if I totally botched them, nobody would have to suffer through a full size cupcake. One quick bite and they had an easy out.

Shopping list in hand, I hit up Wal-Mart. If you have never experienced Wally World 16 days before Christmas, allow me to explain how much you are missing. Whatever you are looking for, rest assured, you will find un-packaged and strewn on the floor. The pickings are slim and the shelves are bare. Lines are 27 people deep with only 3 registers open. And the always happy, ever-helpful, Wal-Mart workers are moving as fast as molasses without a care in the world. I walked around that store for over an hour looking for shortening and orange marmalade before I finally broke down and texted my Facebook peeps to figure out what those even were and what aisle they could be located. The real dilemma of the night was choosing flour. There was bleached flour, all purpose flour, wheat enriched flour, organic flour...Thankfully, Wal-Mart's generic branding flour anticipated the tragic lack of culinary education it's patrons may encounter and graciously decorated it's bag of all purpose flour with cupcakes. It was the last bag and without that little savior, I may still be at Wal-Mart! A Christmas miracle!

Next Step: baking the cupcakes. For those of you that know me, to say I'm not really a baker would be an understatement. I single-handedly set my oven on fire while heating up corn dogs. If left to my own devices in the kitchen, I could accomplish nothing more than burning boiled water-my talent is limitless. Therefore, to tackle the feat of baking 50 mini cupcakes from scratch and topping them with homemade icing, I unleashed my hidden weapon: Alyson.

Beautiful Alyson, an amateur chef writing her own cookbook, naively agreed to supervise my cooking debut. She read off the directions while I mixed, beat, folded, whipped and overall abused the raw ingredients. Alyson patiently guided me through the process and we successfully made 30 chocolate chip banana nut cupcakes and 24 sweet orange cupcakes.

The Journey Continues: making icing while cupcakes cool. I love chocolate with bananas, so I chose a chocolate-Kahlua icing as the perfect mate to my banana nut cupcake. Without Alyson, I never would have made it past the first direction to melt 1 brick of semi-sweet baker's chocolate. We encountered a minor snafu after realizing (yet again, you'd think I would remember this by now) that I do not have a microwave, but Alyson intelligently set up a makeshift stove-top double boiler and we were good after that point. Alyson scooped the icing into the decorator's bag while I held it and then showed me how to pipe on the icing. The first 20 looked pretty sad, but I eventually got the hang of things.

I continued piping while Alyson prepared the cream cheese frosting for the orange cupcakes. The recipe called for nutmeg flavoring which wasn't on my original list of ingredients, so we substituted more orange flavoring instead. It wasn't until the very end of our baking session as we were putting away the milk and shortening that we realized we never used those ingredients. Turns out, I was supposed to make a butter-cream icing instead of cream cheese frosting. Left on my own, I would have panicked, but Alyson's quick thinking to change the recipe saved the day.

The End Result: nothing left to do but chow. The final touches in my attempt to decorate were made and the cupcakes chilled in the fridge for 30 minutes. They were absolutely de-lish, if I do say so myself! Sweet orange cupcakes with orange cream cheese frosting and chocolate chip banana-nut cupcakes with chocolate Kahlua icing topped with mini Nilla Wafers.