It all started when I saw this picture:
I loved the toadstool-forest spread. I felt that it fit in with a lumberjack without being too literal, and since I had some stumps from Clara's birthday, I thought it wouldn't be too difficult to pull off.
Did you read the "I thought"s up there? Well, I thought wrong.
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Don't maple-bacon cupcakes sound amazing for a lumberjack party? I thought so. Manly bacon, naturally sweet maple. I found a recipe online. But they didn't rise very much. They wouldn't work for the toadstool idea unless I had another (bigger) top piece.
So, then I thought: I'll do a red velvet "cap." I won't have to make frosting for the cupcakes (since they will already be red), and red velvet is a southern tradition. I found a recipe online.
Lesson 1: don't blindly assume all internet recipes are tasty or tested.
While in theory, the bacon-maple cupcakes were perfect, they didn't taste great. They reminded me of cracklin' bread. If you've never had that, it's not exactly what I'd call birthday cake. The red velvet caps were all right. A little bland, but aesthetically cracked on top and not nearly as red as they needed to be. I was basically back to square one.
This must be what a Cook's Magazine chef feels like.
Then I made a double batch of cupcake batter using a recipe out of my Cooking Light magazine. I made the first half of the batter plain vanilla (which I would use for the bottoms) and then make the second half of the batter red velvet for the mushroom caps. This recipe was far superior taste-wise. The red velvet was a great crimson color, too. However, the recipe called for a large amount of eggs to give the cupcakes their structure. By the time I stirred the red food coloring into the second half of the batter, my eggs had sunk and left me with some red velvet pancakes.
Still at square one.
So I was now moving on to my fourth try. I whipped up a batch of devil's food cake whoopie pies from my King Arthur Flour Whole Grain Baking cook book. I love that cookbook. (Thanks, Keri!) I figured that red velvet is essentially devil's food with red food coloring.
Lesson 2: red velvet is not just devil's food with lots of red food coloring in it.
If it was, my cupcakes would look red instead of looking like devil's food cake. I made only tops, thinking that some of the cupcakes from earlier tries would be salvageable for bottoms.
But then I saw this:
Meringue? Isn't that a lot of work? Maybe, but I was sure that with my stand mixer it would not be that bad. I just had to wait until very close to party time to make them because I didn't want my meringues to become soft.
I didn't abandon my cupcakes completely for meringue mushrooms. I made meringue bases for the cupcake tops, holding up my wannabe red velvet devil's food mushroom "caps." I also made some of the cute little meringue mushrooms too. But not without doing the whole thing at least twice.
Lesson 3: Do not make meringues with pasteurized egg whites.
Lesson 3b: If it warns you against it on the label, you should probably take heed.
So after trying the recipe with the pasteurized egg whites, against the recommendation of "All Whites," I made another meringue recipe separating whole eggs with much greater success.
Now came the fun of putting it all together. Bamboo skewers were necessary to hold everything together, along with a little bit of cream cheese icing. A dust of cocoa powder or a few dots of frosting added to the mushroom-ness of it all.
That was so much work for such a non-exciting product. Oh, and the moss that I thought I had I couldn't find, so my green foam was exposed for the display (but at this point I didn't care, nor did I have time to find new moss.) But yes, this is the kind of crazy mom I am. It did receive a nice response from my family members, but it was not worth it. I think back on this experience and cringe about the amount of time that went into those stupid cupcakes. I could have just make regular cupcakes, frosted them red, and been done with it. Why did I have to make separate caps and bases? Why?
Lesson 4: Sometimes it is well-worth it to enlist a professional bakery.
It would have been cheaper than going through all those trials. I will remember these lessons (especially #4) as Clara's 3rd birthday comes around.
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