If At First You Don't Succeed....

Well, the heat finally broke (who would have thought 85 would feel COOL?) and after many days of lying dormant, I turned on my oven again. Miss Serious' school is having a flag day celebration, and needed cupcakes. As we have planned to have more food there than any class of first graders can reasonably consume, I decided to make mini cupcakes. And, unlike my normal operating procedure, I even remembered to pick up the cupcake wrappers in advance. So far, so good.

Big Trouble and I got to work and mixed up the batter. The cupcake wrappers were foil, and too large to fit into my pans. Apparently this kind just sits on a baking sheet. Fine - I lined them all up and filled them with batter. My usual batch of batter makes enough for 24 regular sized cupcakes. I was planning on 48 minis, and filled the little cups all the way to the top with batter. I bake a lot, and you'd think I would have recognized the problems with this. First of all, 24 regular cupcakes use a lot more batter than 48 minis. And, as batter cooks, it rises quite a bit. Thus, if you use a full recipe of batter to fill these cups, and then in some fit of insanity fill them all to the top of the wrappers, you'll probably end up with something like this:


Yup, an entire batch of 48 mutant cupcakes. In my optimistic (and lazy) way, I thought I would be able to just pull off the excess cake, but after several torn foil wrappers and cupcake crumbs flung all over my kitchen, I saw reason and just mixed up another batch of batter. This time I made the 48 minis AND 12 regular sized cupcakes like I should have done in the first place. The only thing I can say is that my brain must have melted from all the heat stress of the last few days - I'm hoping it will come back soon, because I have things to do.

Miss Serious said that we needed a flag to celebrate flag day, so this is what I came up with. Happy (early) Flag Day!