The Cupcake That You Never Saw

"I had forgotten about this story. You know, I never told it on the blog because it was so embarrassing at the time but now it's just funny."

I related all this to Kate over dinner at Formoli's as we slurped down a delicious Italian style onion soup. We were at our now regular dinner date where we would play catch up over the past few weeks.

"So what was it?" she inquired.

Sadly, things don't always go as planned. During the days previous to what I call the Cupcake Disaster of Flames I had been obsessed with a new cupcake recipe I had been working on. The premise was that I would create a light and fluffy lemon cake that tasted of sunshine and unicorn giggles filled with blueberry curd so silky that you would melt into a puddle of joy. The whole thing would then be covered in a fine layer of meringue, doused in blueberry vodka and then lit aflame - a burst of sweets and fire of such tasty spectacle that druids would end up dancing nude in my kitchen in awe of it.

In my mind, I tend to exaggerate outcomes. Good and bad.

As I sat down to work, I began to whip together my blueberry curd, a recipe I had created from some raspberry curd one I saw on the interwebs. "A perfect switcheroo," I thought. As I whipped in glob after glob of butter, then a few globs more, I began to think that this recipe was beginning to not seem so right. It was a lot of butter. In fact, curd should not have a pool of oil swashing about listlessly upon the surface. To remedy the problem I whisked the ever-lovin' fuck out of that curd. Seriously, my strong arm was wiped out after that.

The next day the curd tasted like, well, like butter. Funky butter. With a hint of blueberries. Actually, that's a lie. It tasted like oily butter, but blue colored. No berry.

"Okay, so this needs work. Maybe," trying to convince myself, "it will taste better with the cake."

The lemon cake went well enough, but it was dense. I mean dense. Weapons grade, hard as diamond, bludgeon a man to death with my lemon cupcake of skull crushing doom dense. Still, at least it tasted like lemon cake.

"It's still photographable. I can work on the recipe later!"

Luckily, the meringue went off without a hitch. The flambe? Yeah... After about a thousand tries getting it to frickin' light I finally got it lit. The images came out great. I even got video! Yeah! All right! Go me! Cupcakes ablaze, now bring on those nuddie-druids to dance about my skull crushing cupcake of fire!

As I got up to reach for the camera case I then smacked the plate so hard it flew across the room. Bits of flaming egg white streaked across my carpet.

"Shitshitshitshitshit!!!" As I ran with a wet cloth screaming across my apartment attempting to put out the blazing sugar. Lucky for me the flames died out quickly leaving no scorch marks on my carpet and saving my deposit.

After the fire drill, I sank over the kitchen and, with detest, threw the rag into the sink. I looked over at the now mangled blue butter centered, skull crushingly dense cupcake with not destroyed semi burnt meringue. I picked it up and lifted it to my mouth. The smell was okay, the appearance was off-putting. I opened my mouth and decided to take a big bite, but only after a moment of hesitation.

"And that's the story of how an entire batch of cupcakes made it into the trash. The end."

Kate and I clinked our glasses together and dove into the whiskey burger that had been set before us. Sometimes, it's just better when you aren't the one cooking.