Cupcakes and Cookies and Gettin' My Groove Back

Man! I hit a slump there for awhile. We all hit them but man, did-i-hit-this-one-hard. I told you about the wedding cake that melted on me. Then I had this birthday cake to do for a customer's birthday. It was so beautiful in my head. It was to be peacock colors and stacked and just great. But when it got down to it and I was putting it together it just wasn't cooperating. The fondant wasn't cooperating. The cake wasn't cooperating. The cake topper I made for it wasn't cooperating. It was making me question myself in a big way. Not to make excuses for myself, but one problem is how hot and humid it's been here and it can throw everything off. PLUS (and I mean a BIG PLUS) my newly diagnosed arthritis has screwed with me a lot too.

But I think I got my groove back. I had a recipe that I wanted to play with and my mom just so happened to need something to take into work with her. A coworker of hers was celebrating five years of remission from breast cancer. YOU GO GIRL! And all the ladies in the office threw her a party and it was requested to make something with chocolate. So I tried these chocolate merlot cupcakes. I noticed that the batter was really slack and I worried about that a little bit. I continued with the cupcake plan though. I didn't have time to bake a cake, wait for it to cool and then frost it. While they were baking I made some Merlot Swiss Butercream. It took quite a bit of merlot to taste the merlot. I actually lost count of how much I put in :) oops. But once you could taste it, it was quite good. It would have been better with chocolate buttercream, but I was low on any kind of chocolate. So, anyways, back to what I was talking about. So after frosting all the cupcakes I tried one. I took the wrapper off and the cupcake fell apart. Just what I was afraid of. It would have been good as a cake, still crumbly, but better than for a cupcake (in my opinion). But it was tasty none the less. But needs work.

TA-DA!!

Then this past week I did cookies for another customer. She just needed some tropical fish and surfboards but I did a couple extra to play with. They were so cute. And I glittered them all up. Whatcha think?