Hey cupcake!

My daughter, LG, just turned seven last week. In light of that momentous occasion, she wanted to bring cupcakes to school. Pretty common request from kid to mom, I'm sure. However, I'm in the middle of reading a book called No Impact Man by Colin Beavan. Mr. Beavan points out how much of what we use is designed to be used for less than five minutes and then thrown away. I was shocked to look at my lifestyle with that viewpoint in mind. I throw away so much stuff that took far longer to design, make and transport than it will take me to use it and throw it away.

So when my daughter wanted cupcakes, I was in the mood to cut down on the use-five-minute-or-less-trash. To me, that meant I wanted to make the cupcakes from scratch, without any cupcake wrappers. As a super added bonus (and one that also figured heavily in the decision), I would avoid all the odd and unknown ingredients that the boxed cakes and frostings seem to have.

There was only one problem. I didn't really have any trusted cake or frosting recipes in my recipe box. No worries, I thought! I'll just try out a bunch of recipes and see what happens. I'm in a baking mood and who can be sad that I've made cakes for them to taste test! The first cake was a white cake that didn't make it out of the "eh" category, but the second yellow cake was yummy.

I made something like 48 cupcakes, which with my one 12-cupcake pan took forever. I didn't use cupcake wrappers. I was afraid the cupcakes would dry out without the wrapper protecting them, but I stored them in the fridge and they were fine for three days. (I can't say if they would have been fine longer or not because they got eaten.) So, I count this part of the project as a win both because they turned out yummy and because I saved cupcake wrappers, cupcake-wrapper packaging and box-cake packaging from the landfill.

The frosting part didn't turn out so great. I tried a buttercream recipe, but either due to the recipe or my skills, it didn't taste very good. I was by then out of time and patience, so I threw out what I had made and bought some canned frosting. I'll have to practice homemade frosting another day - which will be later this week because I still need to frost more cupcakes for her birthday party - argh! So, a fail for the frosting so far, though I can at least recycle the plastic container the frosting came in and the frosting that I threw out make it into my compost pile. That's better than nothing, I guess.

What did I learn about all this? I don't need cupcake wrappers. I now know how to make a good yellow cake. And I learned that I do not have the patience to make cupcakes for 26 classmates again. I've already warned LG for next year.

The Path Less Taken

Of course we've all heard about global warming and the dire warnings about our planet's environmental future. Of course we don't want the earth to go belly up. Of course we want to help make sure that doesn't happen. I don't know about you, but it doesn't seem so clear cut to me about HOW to do that. Changes need to be made - in ourselves, in our culture - but HOW will that happen? What should be changed? The best way to green up is not obvious. There's always other considerations to take into account such as cost, health pros/cons or convenience.

However, even if the path to green isn't obvious, it's still a path I feel I need to start down. I'm expecting it to be a slow, incremental path. Changing habits takes time, after all. And my family isn't always going to be supportive of all the changes I want to make. But, as I read in a book recently, I want to stop wanting the changing and start doing the change. By making the changes in myself, I'll see what's hard or easy about the changes. I not only want to get myself down that green path, but see what's stopping others to head down that path too. Along the way, I'm hoping to inspire others to reduce their environmental impact too. And I'm hoping someone will give me some advice about how to do it better!

As a little background, I'm a stay at home mom for two kids - LG (Little Girl) was is newly 7 and BB (Buddy Boy) who is 3 and a half. I have a husband (Bob) who teaches at a local college. We live in Ann Arbor, Michigan which is a pretty friendly place for recyclers and reuse of materials. So with that nice support system, I'm off to figure out which way is green.