Tuesday, July 5, 2011

These cupcakes deserve their own post…

The past few years I have made made special cupcakes for the 4th of July block party.  4th of July 2009 and 4th  of July 2010  This year I decided to make these

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but I called around to every place where I thought I could get brown cupcake wrappers but had no luck. So I moved on to these

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But then I couldn’t find the green cupcake wrappers so I decided to go with white wrappers instead.  I went to tint the green frosting but I couldn’t get it the right color green. At that point I hadn’t baked the cupcakes. So I moved on to what I thought would be an easy design.  All you did was bake a chocolate cupcake and use white frosting.  Then you melt down Jolly Rancher candy (red and blue) and use a cookie cutter to make stars and place a red and blue star on each cupcake.  How hard can that possibly be? Right…. Well about the hardest thing I have ever done. 

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I broke up the candy and started melting it down on Saturday morning so I could have the candy done and cooled by Sunday night.  Well the project that I thought would take no time started getting extremely frustrating. Out of a tray of 12 stars I would get about 5 or 6 good ones because once the candy got cooled well enough me to handle it was brittle and the points of the stars broke off.  After 6 1/2 hours over two days I finally had enough stars made.

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Once I got the stars done I thought I was on a roll and decided that I would decorate 2 of the 4 dozen cupcakes so that I would have more time to hang out on the 4th.  Now Sunday was one of the hottest days we have had.  I had the air conditioning and fans going in the house.  I finished the 2 dozen cookies at around 10:30 Sunday night.  When I woke up Monday morning at 6:45 I went in to check on the cupcakes and this is part of what I found….

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It’s really hard to tell in this picture but some of the stars had slid down into the cupcake while other stars just fell on the cupcake and the candy melted a little and left a gross syrup on the frosting.  Now the other 2 dozen cupcakes I left on the table were as hard as stones because of the fan and air conditioner.  I was so tired when I went to to bed that I didn’t think about the cupcakes getting hard and that I should put them in a container to keep them fresh.  The candy that I left out on the take for the other cupcakes had melted to the waxed paper and broke when I tried to peel them off.

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I was so upset!!!  I couldn’t believe after all the time I had put into those cupcakes and the money that I paid for all the candy, the cake and frostings and the cookie cutters that I had to buy.  What a mess and complete failure of a project!!! 

By the time I had figured out that everything was ruined I had 45 minutes before Kelly was going to be here to pick me up for the parade so I went as fast as ever to the grocery store to get all the stuff for a new batch of cupcakes.  After all I couldn’t show up to the party with no cupcakes.  So I decided to make the same ones that I made last year.  They were on the easy side and didn’t take 6 hours of prep to do.

My mom came over after I baked all the cupcakes and helped me to decorate them. 

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Again not a great picture. I forgot to take one before leaving the house so I took this one with my phone at that party. 

Next year is going to go much smoother because I’m not going to wait till the last minute to plan!!!!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I can't believe how much time you put into those stars and it didn't work out, those stinkin' stars. Remember, when in doubt stick with those M&Ms. You are a trooper for working to hard.