Chickenlips Knitting

Although she has always had her own style, her current one is a bit less freakazoid. Two tone hair, which is OK by me as long as they're natural shades; one of her dad's old shirts and a more or less perpetual wry expression. It may be too much to hope for, that she'll trim the fringe so it doesn't overhang her eyes...

Since my sparkly sock yarn, Glam Sock, is hopelessly backordered, I found myself with nothing to dye on her birthday, so I decided to bake chocolate cupcakes with pink icing - all from scratch. I used to cook and bake all the time, before I discovered that my kitchen could yield a product that generates cash flow (does that ever sound like I'm in my kitchen cooking meth! Well, given the addictive nature of yarn, maybe I am) so I figured it'd be sweatless. Boy howdy, was I wrong.

On the first batch, I overfilled the cupcake tins, resulting in overflowing tops that stuck to the pan. Meh. So as fast as I could, I switched tactics, having made a bodacious amount of cake batter - a Ghirardelli fudge cake recipe that tastes just as awesome if you use Hershey's cocoa, which is what we had. I decided to make a layer cake.

The powdered sugar supply level in the cupboard being critical, there was enough to fill and frost the 2 thin cake layers with pink (I used rather a lot of Wilton's rose icing tint) and literally "fudged" enough chocolate icing for the cupcake carnage. Yeah, the whole thing looks like a big bag of sad. The top layer broke apart, so I made Frankencake, sticking it back together with icing. If only this dreary story would stop there, but Michelle has classes until early evening on Wednesdays and is usually in a less than genial mood when she gets home. Such was the case on her birthday, and so she declined to eat any of the cake at all.

Next year: Hello, Haggen supermarket? Bakery department, please.