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Historical November–December 2019 article. Dates, prices, services and contacts describe the source period; current availability has not been established.
Here’s a cupcake story: I was assigned the task to make cupcakes for one of the girls birthdays.
I suppose my wife thought, “nobody can screw up cupcakes”. Well, I went to the store and combed the aisles looking for cupcake mix. Couldn’t find it in the baking aisle, no luck in the snack aisle, shut out in the cookie aisle.
Now I’m getting angry at the store for not having cupcake mix.
I go back to the baking aisle, because that’s the logical place, see a woman and ask, “Do you know where I can find cupcake mix”?
To this day I can still see her face.
It was a mixture of disbelief, pity and sorrow.
I could almost see the thought coursing through her brain. “Is this guy that dumb”?
She stammered, “It’s just cake mix. There’s a recipe for cupcakes on the box”. Cupcake mix is cake mix! Buoyed by this revelation I went home to bake them, thinking “nobody can screw up cupcakes”.
When I make something from a recipe, I follow it to a T.
I don’t estimate, eyeball or ballpark.
If the thing wants a teaspoon, it gets a teaspoon. So I followed the recipe and got twelve cupcakes.
I was a little puzzled because the recipe claimed the cupcake yield was twenty-four.
But I followed the recipe to a T, figured it might be a typo, so in the oven they went. Still, the twelve/twenty-four thing nagged at me.
I called my wife and explained what I had done.
Her reaction startled me. “Are you that dumb! How can you screw up cupcakes”!!???
I checked the oven and saw that I didn’t have cupcakes, I had hubcaps.
The twelve/twenty-four thing became an epiphany. You only fill the cup halfway!
I suppose I’m the one who can screw up cupcakes. Although they didn’t taste bad, baking must be more about presentation, rather than execution. Happy birthday Anne!
Originally published in The Times of Skinker-DeBaliviere, November–December 2019.
Read this article in the original newspaper issue.
Original source: SD_Times2019_11.pdf, printed page(s) 4; PDF page(s) 3.
