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For the Fun of It

This had been planned for sometime now.  And it started with this photo.

I know they're cupcakes!
My girlfriend Jami became excited about these stilettos so we planned an unusual afternoon activity where we'd make these cupcakes and the guys would have to figure out what to make for dinner. Now when you think about this, it is a great idea.  I've made enough dinners in my life to make them rather uninspiring for me, so I'll pass that work off to others.  With the dinner part assigned, I'm free to do something really truly inspiring, like making stiletto cupcakes!

So Saturday was the day to be cake and frosting creative.  It started with one final search for the right kind of Pepperidge Farm cookies, Milano Melts.  But they were nowhere to be found so I settled for Pepperidge Farm, Monaco cookies. Apparently not all Canadian grocery chains stock Pepperidge Farm products as readily as U.S. stores do, so it took four stops to find anything that would work.  (BTW, the Monaco is too thick so use the Milano Melts if you can find them.)


The unadorned stiletto
Then a batch of cupcakes in different coloured cupcake liners were baked so they'd be ready for frosting by 4 pm.  There were yellow and purple, dark brown and pink liners leaving the colour of the shoes up to us.  Additionally I'd done some YouTube surfing and found a channel I really, really like by the name of My Cupcake Addiction.  Elise, a New Zealand native now Australian cupcake baker, makes it look so easy you can't help but think you too can do anything she does "almost" as well as she does it.

So Jami and I moved forward making frosting and dying it in fully saturated colours of orange, purple, yellow, blue and lime green.  Jami says she had never made frosting before, but it certainly didn't show.  She was very handy when it came to decorating the shoes, etc.

Our shoe colours with the Manaco cookies in most of them
Then we started the process of putting the "shoes" together.  The cutting of the Pirouline rolled wafers "heels" to fit into the "sole" of the shoes was one of the most difficult parts of the adventure, luckily we had plenty of cookies to cut.  Our only limiting factor was the number of Monaco cookies.  There were only 15 in the package, something I didn't know when I purchased them.

We had 6 extra cupcakes left over to decorate or leave as they were just frosted.  It was decided we'd try other of Elise's designs.  Jami made the turkey, we both worked on the cherry pie, I made a version of a yellow delicious apple (with a chocolate filling) with three yellow seeds showing where a "bite" was taken.  Oh, we laughed and enjoyed the entire three hour it took us to decorate those 21 cupcakes and talked about how we'd made little pieces of art.

3 pairs of stilettos and the apple with the bite taken out

4 pairs of stilettos and the makeup cupcake in the corner

Roast Turkey

Our cherry pie

The make-up kit, mascara at the top, lipstick and nail polish and a brush at the bottom

The guys couldn't get into the kitchen until well after 7 pm so we had a rather late dinner.  But it was a great meal, with plenty of salmon, roast vegetables, and lime/cilantro rice.  The dessert, the dessert was spectacularly decadent.  What with the cake, frosting, cookies and candies, each cupcake was at least 300 calories!  So I took our leftovers to work where people oohed and aahed over them and then ate them up.

We were celebrating a birthday; here's John on a sugar high
So not only does yarn get my creative juices flowing, so does sugar, butter and cake.  Do check out My Cupcake Addiction, you can spend hours watching Elise's creativity.  Oh, and unless you want to weigh a ton, be sure to have plenty of active eaters around.  These decadent cakes have a short shelf-life.

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