Cupcakes & Driving

First, I have another confession to make.  I love Pinterest.  I've been browsing and searching and wondering "should I pin this?" for days now and I can't help myself.  The upside of my obsession is that people pin all kinds of awesome foods and their other culinary projects.  One of them that has caught my eye and kept my attention is these amazing little cupcakes.

[caption id="attachment_250" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Photo courtesy of Pinterest"][/caption]

They're so delicate and pretty and (like most cupcakes) look almost too good to eat.    But I think I'm obsessed with them because the one time I tried to make roses out of icing they looked a lot more like the doodles you draw with your eyes closed while using your non-dominant hand.

I've been looking for tutorials, instructional videos, anything on how to make them but everything I've found seems to be pretty lacking.  Almost without fail they have three steps.  1 - make the center a tight spiral on a rose pin, 2 - make the petals outside the center spiral overlapping and progressively large, 3 - slide the rose off the pin.

Am I wrong to ask for more than that?  Should I just be continually trying my hand at it instead of looking for more detailed directions?

Please tell me that someone out there has something I can use to learn this skill.  Otherwise, my husband is going to be appalled at the amount of buttercream I can cover the kitchen in while trying to be skillful.

In other news, I love my new Jeep and I hate driving in this country.



This morning the three lanes of traffic that lead up to West Bay had turned into five.  And while I was trying to squeeze through two of those "lanes" I ended up perpendicular to traffic (because I was trying to merge right and merging doesn't happen unless you actually throw your car in front of someone else's) and almost t-boned by an Aston Martin that thought going through me would work better than waiting for me to move.  Luckily, his brakes actually work but that didn't help the three Land Cruisers sitting in between myself and the gas station.

Ten minutes, tons of honking and no gas later I was on my way to work swearing like a sailor and cursing the day that the shoulder and the median between the frontage road and the actual road became "lanes".

Photos of my driving adventures will appear soon on my husband's blog.  And yes, I took photos while driving but what else do I have to do while sitting in traffic staring at my own impending doom that happens to come branded as a Toyota?