Cupcakes in Bloom

I never thought of myself as this "crafty" or overly creative person until recently but thanks to my dear friend Martha Stewart, Ive begun to move over to the "D.I.Y. dark side".  Love her or hate her, the woman knows what she's doing when it comes to anything creative and she can make a masterpiece with shreds of paper, ribbon and a hot glue gun.  You read her magazines, watch the show and look at all the blogs and are bowled over but how fantastic something looks and before you know it you are sucked in, telling yourself oh so reassuringly like she makes it seem that you at home can do this as well.    You will be in the middle of a store looking at some sort of decoration and want to fall over at the price tag until you think to yourself "Oh I can totally make this at home.  Martha will have a template online or a YouTube video to just walk me through the process and then here you are knee deep in some crazy project that never in a million years did you think you would be concocting at home". 

Well this past weekend I got myself into quite the epic baking project.  There was a baby shower for our friend Julia and because Julia is a lover of all things cupcakes we came up with the perfect centerpiece/dessert: the cupcake bouquet.  Right from the beginning, there wasn't an ounce of hesitation that I wouldn't be able to pull this off and read endless blogs and watched a slew of YouTube videos to better familiarize myself with all of the "how-to" mechanics.  I read the trouble shooting tips to avoid any sort of mishap and even did a test run assembly with store bought cupcakes so I wouldn't be trying this for the first time at 10pm on the night before the shower.  I rounded up a strong baking crew to assist in the baking and decorating since we were making over 200 cupcakes and putting together 8 arrangements and even made countless "to-do" lists and schedules so it would be perfectly planned out.  Baking the cupcakes was a quick sprint in the park.  I picked 4 classic flavors that I make all the time so it would be a straight forward process and discovered the "life-changing" joys of what a 24 well muffin pan could do to your baking. (I always knew that massive muffin pan from WS would come in handy one day).  Assembly of the cupcakes onto the Styrofoam balls went better then expected once we got into a groove and then we hit the frosting stage and here's where things started going downhill fast.  For a majority of my cupcakes I use a cream cheese based frosting that's delicious and super easy to make and I never thought for a second that it wouldn't work well on the bouquets.  Well let's just say cream cheese frosting isn't meant to be piped on a different angles, gravity is not it's friend and we discovered pretty quickly that we were having temperature control issues as well with the frosting.  I couldn't pipe a cupcake for a life of me without it looking like a 6 year old did it and needless to say I was frustrated and ready to throw that piping bag against the wall and after everything going so smoothly all day, the project was at a standstill and we had 200 naked cupcakes that needed frosting. 

This is why you should always have close friends around you for projects like that aren't afraid to go tell you to take a breath, step away from the ledge and take control of the sinking ship and that's what Carmina did (and I know one day is she going to have quite the project that I will be assisting with to make this a fair trade off).  She convinced me that we needed a much thicker frosting that would hold up so after much debate we switched to a Swiss meringue butter cream that as soon as she started piping we knew would be successful.  There were points where we were covered in blue frosting, and I was even attacked by frosting coming out of the mixer that gave us all a good, much needed laugh. I never thought the process would end and in what had by then turned into the wee morning hours the last cupcake was piped and the kitchen was cleaned.  I can tell you I was humbled in a big way that very few things have the ability to do to you and I would have never made it without Carmina and Lisa who became our chief sprinkler and cupcake filler.  We learned a lot about the art of the cupcake bouquet and I know for a fact that this isn't the last of the cupcake bouquets in my life.  It's only a matter of time before the next big baking adventure that we get ourselves into comes along and we'll be ready to go for whatever the baking gods throw at us.  

The cupcakes made it to the shower in one piece and they looked great on the tables and everyone flipped out over how fabulous the idea was.  When you hear all of that, all the butter, eggs and time becomes worth it and you forget about the process of getting there and just that one moment in front of you where it couldn't be more perfect and everything else goes away.