On April 15th, probably like a lot of you, I was glued to Twitter watching the events at the Boston Marathon unfold. After bleakly thinking about how much sadness there was in the world I checked Facebook and saw this picture:
A friend and her two boys making cupcakes. The simplicity of what the children were doing, while wearing Boston Celtic’s t-shirts, was touching. So much sadness but also so much innocence and promise.
That’s when I decided to close the laptop and walk away. I wasn’t doing anyone any good being glued to the laptop. The minions and I went to the creek and hunted for crawdads.
I asked my friend Heather, who blogs at http://calluna.wordpress.com to share about the cupcakes with us. So, here she is in all her cupcake making glory!
I’m no Betty Crocker, Martha Stewart or Paula Deen — despite being from the South — but I can follow the directions on the side of the cake mix. Most of the time, at least.
Give me a white cake mix [AKA Jane Random: White cake mix is vile. Do not follow her example on this. Why would anyone choose white when yellow exists…when BUTTER yellow exists even!] some gel food coloring and a cool idea from the Internet and I can do wonders, like these multi-colored cupcakes the boys and I made Sunday.
One of the boys made a special request for blue cupcakes, blue frosting, no sprinkles. Well, I one-upped them. I remembered seeing on the Internet years ago an idea for making a rainbow cake by coloring the batter the various colors of the rainbow and layering them one on top of the other.
We did something like that but a little more random.
We had blue cupcakes and blue frosting, as requested. But we also had blue and green ones, blue and pink ones and a few with all the colors (blue, pink, green and yellow).
I made the batter and let the boys color it, trying to surrender some of my micro-manager tendencies [AKA Jane Random: My Mom is a micro manager. I feel her boys pain.] and letting them actually do it, not just “help.”
It was fun to them to use kitchen tools that ordinarily I wouldn’t let them near, and a tad educational, too, on things like how to use a hand mixer and how NOT to use a hand mixer. Always turn the mixer off before pulling the beaters of the batter; things like that.
Their favorite part was, of course, eating the fruits of their labor.
The best part for me was the brownie points — er, should I say cupcake points — that I won for leading them in doing something yummy, pretty and fun.
And a tad bit the eating part, too.
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Thanks, Heather! As Rachel Held Evans would say ‘Eshet Chayil! Woman of Valor!’
So, kids, what valorous things have you done lately?