Trading one addiction for another

Recently, with the help of my community’s department of mental health services, I was informed that I am addicted to work. Apparently, “workaholic” is an actual thing. Usually, I feel as though if I work twelve hours a day, it’s not enough, and I don’t have enough time to get anything done.

As a result, I am now taking my first hiatus from writing in six years. I needn’t tell you, gentle reader, that it blows real hard. All I want to do is write. Great ideas just keep popping up. But I’m forcing myself to ignore that urge, and, like a smoker who chews gum to quit smoking or a heroin addict who smokes cigarettes to quit heroin, I’ve found a parallel addiction to rule my time.

Crafts.

The glorious anniversary of my birth is tomorrow, and as a present, my friend Cheryl Sterling over at Writers, Like Me gave me this:

This is A Zombie Ate My Cupcake, a book full of some of the strangest, most pointlessly complicated cupcakes you will ever see. And I have made it my personal mission this summer to make them. All of them.

I started out with Lily Vanilli’s Rainbow Cupcakes. Now, I’ll be honest. She has a recipe for the actual cake in there. But cake and I… we don’t get along. I’m not good at making cakes without a mix, so I will confess, I used a mix. But I did make her frosting recipe (I am amazing at making frosting). The cupcakes turned out like this (pre-frosting):

Mine turned out quite short, because I am new to this whole cupcake thing and I didn’t fill the cups enough. As it turns out, that was a point in my favor, because once I had made twelve little cupcakes, I had enough left to make my own version of a rainbow cake. I made a tie-dye cake:

This fulfilled my life-long need to eat something that looked like the pretend food they ate in Neverland in Hook.

Once I got the cakes frosted, I decided to take a look at the inside, to see how the rainbow effect worked out:

Aww and yeah. Look at all that rainbow-y goodness. These cupcakes are magical. I don’t know what it is about eating something that looks like you’re having a mild hallucination, but it tasted delicious. As per Ms. Vanili’s forward, I used fair-trade ingredients whenever possible. Farm fresh eggs and hand churned, organic butter from the hippie farm. I think it made the cake taste more psychedelic, even if it came out of a boxed mix.

I’m letting my daughter pick out the next cupcake design to try, though I’m a bit nervous she’s going to want to jump right into the ones with sculpted marzipan fingers.

Stay tuned for further projects. Besides the cupcakes, I’ve also got some other things up my sleeve, crafts wise, this summer.

Trading one addiction for another

JennyTrout

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