I Am No Sweet Genius

Another Academy Awards tradition (yes, I'm still posting about the Oscars, apparently... they're a big deal for me this time of year and I meant to write this story awhile ago, and ANYWAY, I just really want to share this experience and am not going to let it slide like so many other topics that come to mind inevitably do)(that's a long enough digression, holy moly)...

Where the heck was I?  Ah yes.

Another Academy Awards tradition is that I make cupcakes for dessert for the event.  It all began when I decided I wanted to make Oscar statues out of icing to decorate some cupcakes a few years ago.  It became a big joke that I would try to write funny images in icing on my cupcakes.  Lately, however, I've been too lazy to deal with all the different coloured icings.  Hopefully I'll get back into that tradition sometime.

However, I still wanted to make cupcakes.  I decided to try a new idea from these cupcake recipe cards I received as a gift a long time ago.  My family loves black forest cake, and cherries and chocolate are a winning combination for especially my dad and I.  I made a basic Devil's Food chocolate cake mix (I'm still not quite at the point of making my cakes from scratch, haha, one day!).  The next step is to take canned cherry pie filling, remove 24 cherries to save for garnish later, and then add a teaspoonful of pie filling to each bit of batter.

I was so determined this would be Awesome and Amazing, I had the foresight to take some pictures of the process.

Adorable batter-with-cherries!  Feeling SO ULTIMATE BAKER-LIKE!

So, of course... this totally. did. not. work.  hahahaha.

When the cupcakes were done baking, I went to remove them from the pans... and the cherry filling must have been too heavy, so it all went straight through the batter and in the bottom of the pans.

Disaster!


I had the genius idea to flip them over, however, and make them into cherry-upside-down-cupcakes.  Fortunately the plan was to smother them with a whipped cream topping, and they still tasted very good.

Let's just say... I won't be applying for the Food Network's Sweet Genius TV program JUST YET...