When dealt a lemon, making lemonade...

My friend, Tara, came over to bake with me today. She wanted to try out the chocolate torte and she also needed to make some cupcakes for a bake sale at her daughter's school. I also wanted to make some cupcakes and decorate them for the Relief Society activity. I wasn't sure how I was going to decorate them, but I wanted to try my aunt's cream-cheese filled cupcakes and was thinking I'd make them look like Hostess chocolate cakes- you know, the ones filled with cream and have that peel-able chocolate frosting with the white loopy stuff?

Well, we tried to rush the baking portion and the cupcakes that Tara made were burned to a crisp on the bottom (Note to self: if I ever want to try baking 24 cupcakes at the same time, put the pans on a higher rack). I felt horrible; she wasn't happy either. Thankfully, she had other things to take to the bake sale, but we had all these cupcakes just sitting there with burnt bottoms and neither one of us really wanted to dump all of them into the garbage.

I said, "Well, maybe we can make a Rapunzel tower out of stacked cupcakes..."

And there you have it, the Nadine-style solution to a cupcake disaster: over-the-top, almost impossible, radically crazy idea of taking whatever we have on hand and making something ridiculously difficult. Huh. At one point, after the "tower" had collapsed and Tara and I were surrounded in cut-off burnt cupcake bottom crumbs, I started laughing hysterically. Talk about over-achiever...

Rapunzel's Tower:
cupcake style

Well, I think it worked, despite the tower falling over about 4 times (that I counted). I used the Silhouette to cut out the room of the tower, pilfered a cone from my Wilton Castle Kit (at least it's good for something). And, even though it leans a little, has some odd buttressing at the base and I should've drawn in the window before I piped the hair, really, for a last-minute lemons-to-lemonade, it isn't too shabby!

Detail of Rapunzel's window and the leafy vine

Detail of the grass pipped at the base of the tower.
I wish I'd had a better "bowl" to display it in.

We'll see if we win any contests... But really, the true award was given when both of our daughters (Bijoux and Miranda) asked if this was THEIR birthday cake? and could they have one just like it? That's the biggest success!

Not bad for taking burnt cupcakes and making them into something a little more original and a lot more edible!