My Nemesis...

Gentle Reader...I vainly fancy myself a decent cook. That is, unless I am faced with my greatest nemisis. I can't quite say an enemy, as it has no hard feelings towards me. Ha! It has no feelings at all...or should I say, THEY have no feelings at all. If they did, perhaps they'd take pity on me. But NO! Their creation is one of my greatest weaknesses.

Yes.

I speak of the cupcake.

"What???" I can hear you, Gentle Reader. I hear you saying, "Miss L. ANYONE can make a cupcake." Perhaps. But not everyone can make a GOOD cupcake. And I want to make a good cupcake because, as stated above, I am VAIN about my cooking skills. And cupcake mastery eludes me. Normal regular cupcakes ELUDE me. Cupcakes you try to make in a cute ice cream cone...disaster! And now this. GRRRRRRR.

Today I attempted to make "Full Moon Cupcakes" for Miss E's preschool snack tomorrow. As it is her birthday, it is the tradition of the birthday's honoree to bring the snack and most mom's do something special for said occassion.

As we know of Miss E's strange and consistant love of things Space and Astronautical (hmmmmm. Is that a word? It is now, I guess), I searched for something fun to make. And I found full moon cupcakes. These are also known as "Black Bottom Cupcakes" because you have a chocolate bottom and then a cream cheese top that has chocolate chips in them. If done correctly, the cream cheese spreads over the top of the chocolate bottom and the chips look like little moon craters. How cute would that be. Also, they qualify for snack because there's not oodles of frosting, which the teachers have told us they hate giving to the children because of a) the mess and b) most kids wipe off much of the frosting (or just eat the frosting) which then causes a) the mess to occur.

I began about 4:00pm because technically, the cupcakes only need 20 minutes to bake. So. I got the batter done. I got the cream cheese stuff done. I piped the cream cheese into the center of the batter. I put them in the oven. Things seemed to be going well. I was excited. And then, I started thinking of dinner.

Frozen chicken breasts, to be exact, and then the phone rang. My friend from St Louis! Hello Miss P! We are busy chatting away and what do I do? Yes. With about 6 or so minutes left, I start to "preheat" the oven...to 425.

But wait, I hear you say, Gentle Reader. You are already baking those great cupcakes! Ahhhhhhh, yes. Yes. You speak truth. And I know that now.

425 degrees for 6 minutes is, well, quite a long time if you are trying to go for moist wonderful Black Bottom Full Moon Chocolate Cupcakes. It tends to...dry them out, shall we say? AND, on top of that...who knows what I did, but the cream cheese has become more of a center filling than the top of the cupcake, as the chocolate cake part has basically tried to SWALLOW it's little cream cheese center.

Thus, the cupcakes are more of a dry Black Hole Cupcake than anything else.

CURSES!!!!!

Super J (super as always) says they look cool and that the little preschoolers won't care. And he's probably right. We will try out the spare ones for dessert for F.H.E. tonight and see what the reaction is. If it's good, I will go ahead and send them with my cheeks flushed.

If it's bad...maybe it's not too late to make the old stand-by: chocolate chip cookies. I make a mean chocolate chip cookie.

sigh.