Cupcakes: A Tale of Woe

I know that usually, when I talk about Chris and my cooking adventures, it's to show off our magnificent feats in the kitchen -- herb-glazed, roasted, what have you. This tale is to counter-balance all of those cooking adventures.

It all started when Chris bought me sprinkles. A lady from church had brought cookies with sprinkles on them, and I'd raved about my love of sprinkles, and so Chris got it into his head that his wife needed a container of sprinkles. "I can't buy her much, but I can buy her sprinkles," thought my lovely husband.

He went to Safeway and found this huge Mother of all Sprinkles containers, holding six different types of sprinkles. I was quite gleeful, and then got it in my head that we had to make cupcakes, so I wouldn't just eat them all out of the container.

We should have gone with our instincts and made it all from scratch, but we had these packages of cake and icing mix laying around. Chris should've read the cupcake instructions, that told you only to fill the cupcake cups a third full. (He went with 3/4.) I should've gone with my instinct that said that one package of frosting was enough, and that we should let the frosting cool before we used it (since we added melted Mackintosh's toffee with sweetened condensed milk). It was so runny, when Chris tried to ice the glooped-all-over-the-place (and whoops! We forgot to grease the cups) mutant cupcakes.

Here I am putting sprinkles on our cupcakes, giant sprinkles container in the foreground, laundry room and Harvest Gold oven in the background (note to self: return flash setting to normal; the photos only look too bright on the tiny display):



A close-up on our sad Charlie Brown Christmas cupcakes, with sprinkles:


And here's Chris, expressing his sadness over our cupcake fiasco.



With the rest of the batter, we poured it into a small pan and made a little cake. The icing was less runny and so I got it to look really nice, and I think I might hold on the badly-done sprinkles, for the cake. (By the way, am I the only one who thinks these photos look like they were taken by people in the '70s?)