Once in a young lifetime one should be allowed to have as much sweetness as one can possibly want and hold. ~Judith Olney

Taelin has been asking for weeks to make cupcakes.  My answer has been no for a few different reasons.  First of all, she seems to ask when there is not nearly enough time to make them.  A few of her favorite times to ask have been right before bed and after we get home from work/daycare and I need to start thinking about dinner.  Second of all, I don't keep cake mixes on hand...for obvious reasons.  The last thing I really need is cake (and the accompanying frosting) at my fingertips.  Which leads me into my third reason, which is if we make cupcakes then we will have cupcakes. And I will want to eat them.

Today after our new bed was delivered (yay!) but before lunch, Taelin asked again if we could please make cupcakes.  I wish I could show you a picture of what her face looked like when she asked me.  There was plenty of time to make them (we didn't really have anything we had to do today) but I still didn't have a cake mix or a real need to have cupcakes.  Deciding that I was just going to have to show some self-restraint when it came to having cupcakes, I checked off something from my list and solved my second problem of not having a cake mix.  I made cup cakes from scratch.

I used this recipe for Rainbow Cupcakes and cut it in half so we only had 12 cupcakes.  The recipe calls for 4 different colors of batter, but since we halved the recipe, we just picked two.  There were a few more steps than a cake mix, but really not that difficult to make and I had everything I needed on hand already.  The cupcakes were really moist and I have to say that I liked them more than a cake mix cup cake...there was just more to them.  I used this recipe for the frosting.  It was very vanilla-y which I liked, but Joe wasn't super fond of.  It was a super easy recipe that I hadn't used before but will use again.  For this recipe too, I had all the ingredients I needed on hand.

Taelin is getting quite good at helping me in the kitchen.  She loves pouring out what I measure and is actually getting more everything in the bowl...which is good!  She is getting to recognize the different things we use for baking and loves wearing her aprons that my mom made for her for Christmas this last year.  I wasn't able to snap any pictures while we were measuring and mixing, but did get some of the coloring of the batter and sprinkling the sprinkles.  And of course this post would not be complete with a picture of her actually eating the cupcakes!

Overall, though they were more work, I thought they were worth it.  I ate just one and since Taelin knows how many she has left there isn't going to be any sneaking one as a blog-night snack.  (That's like a midnight snack only one that I would eat while blogging.)  So, by just saying yes and indulging my little girl a little bit, I used two new recipes and checked one more thing off of my list.  A win-win...covered in frosting and sprinkles.

note the adorable ladybug apron that won out over the butterfly apron

waiting...not so patiently  :)

What they looked like after coming out of the oven...

after the cupcakes cooled (which according to her took 6 hours)
she painstakingly decorated each cupcake

finally product....they were really yummy...and pretty  :)

The BEST part...eating your hard labor.