Just a Teenie Bit: Radioactive Mac&Cheese and late night baking delirium

I really need to stop volunteering to bake goodies for my mom's fellow teachers. Either that or stop baking at nearly ten at night.

Every friday is "Donut Day" at my mom's school. All the teachers bring in assorted store bought baked goods, lay them on a giant table in the teacher's lounge and then step back and watch as every single teacher within a 5 mile radius anxiously scrambles towards the food, possibly knocking out fellow co-workers that try to grab the cream filled pastry before they do. Last year, while living at home, I decided to treat them to home baked cookies and such, since I look down heartily on store bought products. Since I'm home for the winter holidays, I figured...hey, why not grace them with my highly regarded baking skills one last time? Well, I got somewhat lazy. It also didn't help that I didn't start baking till nearly 10:30pm AND we had an over flow of pre-made cake mix and frosting.
Hey people, I make do with what I have.

Before we move on, I'd like to point out the GROSSEST Mac&Cheese that has EVER come into my eyesight...

This is what my parents had for dinner. Yeah, I know. In my opinion, one should not ingest any substance that matches the color of your kitchen walls. It's just so wrong on so many different levels.

Moving on....Before one can start baking, you must be equipped with the proper tools. And by proper tools, I mean a really good drink. Whether

it's water, beer or a shot of Maker's Mark, you need to have something to drink. If you don't, your baking will fail. FAIL. Trust me on this folks, I know what I'm talking about(at least most of the time....kinda...). My drink of choice was a Diet Dr Pepper from Sonic's Drive Thru. If you don't have a Sonic's near you, kill yourself. It's the Ultimate Drink Stop, so if you can't have an ultimate drink, there is no point in you trying to do anything. At all.

Normally I make my own batter, but like I stated earlier, it was late and we had an abundance of premade crap. So, I opted for Duncan Hines Moist Delux Chocolate Fudge cake mix and Pillsbury Whipped Supreme vanilla frosting. Not exactly proud of it, but when you're ready to pass out, premade stuff doesn't sound so bad. Instead of making the whole cake, I had decided to make cupcakes, mainly because I had been craving cupcakes for about two weeks. I felt that if I loved cupcakes, so did everyone else. And if not, well whatever, they don't have a choice. What I say goes in the baking world(or at least MY baking world...). Unfortunately, my mother decided to inform me last minute that she had thrown out our giant cupcake sheet. I was stuck with two flimsy cupcake tins that only allowed me to produce 12 cakes instead of 24. Great. After a giant tantrum which included me throwning tomatoes at my mother and father, I sucked it up and used the tins. I lined the pathetic tins with cute yellow baking cups...and one white and one pink rogue cup...damn them for breaking up my color cordination!

The recipe is pretty easy to follow. You make the cake mix according to the directions on the back of the box and then fill the cupcake holders. Unfortunately, the box gives you all the directions for cupcake making except for how much batter to put in each up. I guessed at the amount and all seemed well in the end. I find it very odd that when you're mixing

the batter, it looks absolutely disgusting. How is it that something that looks like bad Japanese soup can turn into something so sinfully delicious? It's one of life's many mysteries that we'll never quite figure out, I suppose.

When the cupcakes were shoved into their fiery death in the oven, I contemplated my frosting dilemma. I'm not really one for plain frosting. Sometimes it's nice when the cake you're eating has something special in the batter, but when both the cake and frosting are plain, I'm usually highly disappointed. When I eat a cake, I want my mouth to be overjoyed to the point of tears(or slobber)when I bite into it. So in order to make my frosting more exciting, I added a bit of cinnamon. I didn't think about if anyone would be opposed to cinnamon, but it was almost 11:30pm, so I didn't really care either. I took the cakes out when they were nice and cooked, but not without nearly dropping them several times due to the poor quality of the muffin tins I was forced to use. Never again, people. Never. Again. Seriously, I hate disposal cookware. It just isn't trust-worthy! It's like a bad boyfriend. The package seems nice, the concept is great, but it's all lies. It does nothing but let you down and destroy your baked confections....not that I'm bitter or anything.

So anyway, I took the cupcakes out and set them on the cutting board to let them cool. It didn't state on the box whether or not to take them out or let them sit in the tin. I let them set for a bit and then popped them out into new paper cups that were far more interesting and decorative than the previous ones. And they all matched, there were no rogue cups this time around. Around this time I also came up with what I thought was a pretty nifty(yes, I said nifty)idea. I wanted the frosting to look better than as if it had just been slathered on with an oversized spatula by a drunk chimpanzee. So instead of giving an oversized spatula to a drunk chimpanzee, I put it in a baggy, squeezed the frsoting all to one end and cut the corner tip off to try my hand at piping. Yeah. It didn't go over so well. I think the fact that I had trouble enough getting the frosting into the baggie without getting it all over myself should have been a sign that I should have stopped while I was ahead. But I like to try and prove all the "nay-sayers" wrong, and just kept plugging along with my idea. After trying to frost about 4 cupcakes, I realized that i would have to admit defeat. I put down my make shift piping bag, fished out an oversized spatula and handed it over to the chimpanzee sitting at the table downing a bottle of Jack Daniel's.

Just kidding! All of our spatulas were too big to use for frosting my tiny little cupcakes, so I opted for the back side of my stirring spoon.
I bought it at a boutique named Penelope's in Chicago when I went to visit my friend Allison. It was originally 6 bucks(yes I was willing to spend 6 bucks on a spoon) but they dropped it to 4. I thought it was appropriate to use the spoon for frosting since it had a dessert on the top. It worked out really well, actually. The spoon was the perfect size for the cupcakes and it spread the frosting without making a huge mess. I was rather pleased with myself and my awesome little 4 dollar spoon. And people say that it was a waste of money, HA! It's now a multi-purpose spoon and TOTALLY worth the money....and it's cute. And little. Cute little things are awesome. Like myself.

YOU CAN'T DENY THE TINY CUTNESS!

Even thought they were now frosted, I still felt like they needed more in the cuteness factor. I wanted to garnish them with something, but the only thing we had on hand was chocolate donuts that would have crushed the cupcakes, thus ruining everything I had worked on. It was midnight at this point, so I was getting desperate. At the last minute I decided to top each cupcake with a chocolate whopper. I thought it would make them look cute...and possibly like boobs. They were then ready to be put into a container to then be shipped off in the morning to meet their death in the teacher's lounge. Of course the containers I needed for holding my baked goods was WAAAAAAAAAY at the top of our pantry. And of course it was with the liquor...because we all know being wasted is the only way to bake. After about 5 minutes of struggling to get the containers down without spilling 50 year old vodka on myself, I was finally able to put them in what was essentially their death bed. I named them Delirious Cupcakes because by the time I was done with them it was about half past midnight and I was feeling quite unstable.

MMMMmmMMMmmmmMMMMMmm.....

Since I wasn't able to make all 24 cupcakes at once, I had thought of waiting for the tins to cool completely and then make the next 12. But I was tired and starting to see things in my sleepy state, so I wasn't going to wait up all night and make more. So while the cupcakes had been cooling I had used the excess batter to make a small square cake. By the time I was done with the cupcakes, the small cake was already out of the oven and cooling. Thankfully I still had a lot of vanilla frosting left over, so I didn't have to worry about staying up later and making my own icing. But of course, I was not satisfied with a plain chocolate cake being frosted with plain vanilla frosting. I took a bag of those 100 Calorie Chips A-Hoy cookie candy bites, crushed them into tiny pieces(which wasn't as easy or as painless as I thought it would be)and mixed them in the frosting. Again, I didn't care if people would have a problem with this or not. I was so tired at that point they were lucky I didn't crush dog food and put it in there. Finally the cake was frosted and put in it's death bed. I was done. It was 1am and I was FINALLY done. I named the cake Midnight Munchies Cake and even put a little tag on the lid of the container explaining what was in it. Then I collapsed on the kitchen floor and slept for 24 hrs.