There's a Change in My Life I

Okay, as we can see from yesterday's cracked out post, and from Jesse's anectdotal comment, Tylenol Cold is very good, but should be used sparingly. What exactly is the "cool burst"? I'm guessing abysinthe. Now, today I will be writing about two changes that took place in my life over the weekend. For a normal person, these changes would be no big deal; the normal person would be instructing me, perhaps not incorrectly, that I ought to get out more, but I couldn't be more excited and I would like to share them with you now.


I have an Amazon.com credit card and that means that every once in a while, Amazon sends me a gift certificate as if to say, "Here sucker, you spent so much money on your credit card and are in such deep financial doo-doo, why not buy yourself a book and a CD and feel better for about 48 hours?". This is a wonderful marketing campaign, by the way. So, I got my Amazon.com gift certificate and bought myself this book; a purchase that was inspired by the Queen of Cupcakes, as she sometimes uses recipies from this book.

So, the book arrived last week, but I didn't really have time to pour over it until this weekend. There are 163 recipies in the book, or something, and I want to make about 150 of them. Now. Some of them look rather challenging, but some of them look easy enough that even I could pull them off. Moreover, I began to realize from reading this book that the most important thing was to stock my cupcake pantry. If you feel like making cupcakes, but your cupboard is bare, and you need to go out and buy all the ingredients and it becomes a big hassle, you're not going to make cupcakes. But, but I say to you, if you have all sorts of ingredients stocked up to make totally bitchin' cupcake recipies, then you'll be much more inclined to preheat the oven, know what I'm saying?

So then I ran around all weekend, to stock my metaphorical cupcake pantry, which in reality is the top of my refridgerator. I bought a couple of boxes of cake mix, couple of boxes of confectioner's sugar, cream cheese, butterscotch chips, white chocolate chips, semisweet chocolate, milk chocolate, instant coffe, pudding mixes, shredded coconut, chopped nuts, almond, lemon, orange, maple and peppermint extracts and, of course, cupcake liners. No, I do not care to tell you how much I spent on this endeavor. I was so crazy, I even checked at Target on Sunday to see if they still had the Tupperware Cupcake Transporter, which I was ready to plunk down my cash for this time around, with visions of showing up at holiday partys with beautiful cupcakes in the Rolls Royce of cake transportation in tow. {Mercifully, Target was out of stock, which is a recurring motif at our beloved Brooklyn Target}.

But you're asking, did it work? Well, last night I made Devil's Food cupcakes with Maple Butterscotch Icing topped with roasted pecans. They were so good! If you like butterscotch, I totally recommend this frosting recipie, I'd put it on anything: sugar cookies, bundt cakes, rice cakes, cardboard package inserts ... you get the idea.

Crappy camera phone photo to follow.