Hey, this looks like it could be fun!

Anyone wanna go?

That was the gist of the email I sent to my girlfriends when I got a social coupon offer from Faveroo.  Half price for Cupcake 101 Icing Class at Our Cupcakery. Cute little bakery, specializing in - you guessed it! - cupcakes!  Gretchen took me up on the offer and we went to the cupcake decorating class in late February 2012.  It was only an hour or so long, but I was inspired!  Look at the cupcakes I got to take home:

I swirled those!  And starred them, and sprinkled them with Cake Sparkles, which are full of win.  Annette, the instructor at Our Cupcakery, was a lot of fun, full of joy for cupcakes.  And she shared it!  Annette also told us the difference between icing and frosting, which I never knew.  I thought it was a regional dialect: the sweet stuff on top of cupcakes was icing in some places, and frosting in others.  The difference in a nutshell is that no matter what you do to that stuff in the plastic tub next to the cake mix at your local Kroger, it will never stay in nice swirls like that.  Plastic tub = frosting.


Decorator buttercream icing, on the other hand, is awesomesauce.  And there are approximately eleventy bazillion recipes for it on the internet, said Annette.  Hm.  You can do this yourself, at home.  You can get the decorator tips at any craft store, like JoAnn's, or even grocery stores like Meijer. And after the class, with my little brain full of cupcakey inspiration, I drove myself and my half-dozen experimental cupcakes home.

And what was waiting for me in the mailbox when I arrived home?

A sale flyer from JoAnn's.  I shit you not.  So that very weekend, loaded with funds from our tax refund, my darling husband and I went shopping.  We went to Meijer and bought a KitchenAid (all the promotions that day got the price down to $150!!  It's not red, but for that price, white is just fine!!)  And we went to JoAnn's, where I spent the first of several dollars on decorating supplies.

This was my first proud KitchenAid picture, on February 25.  Two days after my first decorating class!  Isn't she lovely?  Just wait until I spiff her up a little.  :-)