The Beginning

As with many things, there is usually a beginning.  The very beginning really started when two young girls started baking when the older fourth-grader brought home a hand-bound recipe book of brownies, chocolate chip cookies, 7-up Cake, and much more.  (Yes, kids learned how to bake in classrooms in those olden days; this was the time before Pillsbury "easy-bakes".)


However, we'll start in December, 2010.  My nephew needed cupcakes for his pre-school birthday party, so we decided to make these adorable owl cupcakes we saw in a cupcake book.  Our cupcakes ended up being entirely too small for the Oreo eyes, so we ended up with oversize-eyed owls that looked pretty comical.  In fact, the whole process of making them was entirely hilarious.  After 15 minutes of experimenting, we had my dad twisting open the Oreos (the cream had to remain a perfect circle on one side), and we had my husband carefully sawing the non-creamed Oreo sides into thirds for the ears (Oreos are very brittle, so that was no easy feat).  My sister and mom frosted the cupcake tops, I added the eyes and placement of the pupils (very important part in expression), my nephew popped on their little yellow "M&M's" beaks (banana Runts are good too), and the owls cycled back to my sister to receive their feathers.  The last step was to add a glimmer of mischief to the eyes, and voila - we had owl cupcakes!  If you'll notice in the picture, there are also cupcakes topped with "bugs" which my sister piped together with "M&M's" on wax paper.