Friday, May 31, 2013

Memorial Day Dreaming

Trae has a pretty awesome co-worker who has an also awesome wife. They have been helpful and were the first friends we made in our impromptu, crazy arrival to our new home. It was nice to have new people so willing to invite us out and introduce us to their friends in order help make our transition smoother. We got invited to their Memorial Day party, and since Trae has been bragging out my baking abilities, I figured I had to wow.

I have no idea if these cupcakes are genius or just a lucky product of no-coffee baking. I was half way through my first cup of coffee when I decided my standard Becky Crocker yellow cake recipe was lacking. So I threw chocolate chips into the batter.  (Side note: While the cupcakes were tasty, all the chips sunk to the bottom of the cupcake. I have heard that if you toss/dust your chips in flour that will prevent sinking.) Now when I don't have a full functioning brain, my mind tends to get a little, well, wibbly wobbbly.


By now I had finished my first cup of coffee and was raiding the pantry. Graham crackers....check. Marshmallows...  jumbo check. (My mom has a thing for giving us marshmallows*; Valentine's presented us with  heart shaped marshmallows and the recent visit gave us jumbo sized marshmallows.)



Yeah, I smile when I see huge sugar clouds in my pantry. I made marshmallow icing. (If you ever need a recipe in a pinch, allrecipes.com is a great place to go!) I garnished the top with graham cracker crumbles, but even with the snazzy cupcake wrappers, I thought the cupcakes were lacking. After trying to saw/ hack marshmallows with a knife, I took scissors and cut the jumbo marshmallows into three disks. The scissors worked wonderfully, and the marshmallows didn't gum up the scissors. I plopped the sugar cloud disks on parchment paper and  broiled them in the oven.

 
Yummmmm....toasted goodness.

With Trae's help, we quickly plopped the toasted goo on top of the cupcakes.Now the fun truly started when we put the last tray of marshmallows in the oven. I didn't trim the parchment paper, figuring that it would be fine. Nope. Trae started to pull out the toasted goodness and swish, the parchment paper kissed the heating element. It was a fleeting moment of love not to be, because the love affair went down in flames. When the paper ignited, Trae freaked and started trying to blow it out like a kid who desperately wanted his wish to come true. I was dying of laughter as he ran out to the garage screaming, "What do I do???" The small fire was quickly put out with no help from laughing me, and cupcake assembly re-assumed. The final product:



* Never roast heart shaped marshmallows. Bad puns ensue such as "a hunk, a hunk burning love" bad puns.

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