Ten Days of Birthday: Day 7

The days of birthday are ticking away and I have to say I've done a pretty good job of deviating from my plan of baking one cake a day. I could give some lame excuses like "I loaned out all my 9inch round cake pans" or "who wants to bake after you've been out yardsale-ing all day?" but we all know I don't make excuses, I make things happen. So in the spirit of getting back to birthday I decided to challenge myself with a cupcake recipe. Cupcakes are not generally thought of as challenging persay, but I found this particular cupcake recipe on Martha Stewart's personal website for Recipes, Cooking Recipes, Food Recipes, Free Recipes, Simple Recipes, and Menus. My darling Martha does not publish a cupcake recipe that is easy or basic, no, Martha's cupcakes are always the height of artsy-fussiness.

The particular recipe I tried was for Hi-Hat Cupcakes. Right off the bat I managed to screw up the cupcake part and baked some really ugly flat cupcakes. I was about this [--] close to pitching them out, but I decided to first try to make the frosting (which I was fairly certain would be a failure as well). The definition of fussiness is standing over a makeshift double boiler with electric beater going full speed for twelve minutes while you wait for an eggwhites and sugar to tripple in volume. I was very pleased when it actually did come together so I forged ahead, eventhough I still wanted to pitch the cake part.

Frosting the cupcakes with perfect spirals and then dipping those perfect spirals into hot melted chocolate without wrecking them is what I would classify as the artsy portion of the recipe. In this regaurd I got things done, but it wasn't pretty. at all. Still, the nice thing about a martha recipe is that you can screw up pretty bad in the execution and the end product will still be fairly impressive... so find your criticisms and shove them up your ass.