After last weekend’s royal cupcake f**k up, my sister and I decided we might have lost the battle, but we weren’t going to surrender the war. So we lined ourselves up for a second attempt (this weekend is cousin K’s fourth birthday and we know we only have one more chance to regain this child’s trust in our cupcake-making-abilities).

In deconstructing the whole disastrous episode, we came up with a list of elements that we considered may have contributed to our downfall. And this time, we removed them all.

In descending order, the likely culprits were as follows:

• Me. My sister would bake Cupcakes Mark II at her house, bring them over, and we’d ice them together. This would remove any chances of my baking curse tainting the actual cake bit.
• My oven. As above. Her oven is electric and therefore – perhaps – more reliable than our old banger of a gas oven. Plus I know she's made excellent things in her oven in the past.
• The gluten-free flour. We had wanted to make our cupcakes coeliac-friendly for our granny's benefit, but we’ve since been informed that gluten-free flour is actually a bit of a bitch to cook with and was probably the reason why the cakes didn’t rise. So in came regular old wheat flour to save the day.
• The tight deadline. Since the teacher had informed us these uber-failsafe recipes were so brilliant you could even make them a day or two ahead of time and they’d still be fine, my sister decided to make them a day before the event this time. This way there was time for contingency planning, in the unlikely event of such a requirement arising.
• The recipe. The teacher had also made a plain vanilla cupcake on the night, so we thought we’d try that one instead, even though the chocolate cupcake recipe’s been shredded and used to line the cat’s litter tray.

So, with this 5 point plan in place, I had actually started to fantasise about domestic goddess-liness again, or at least creating an illusion of it (I’ve always found delegating the hard parts very effective for improving my own results).


But alas, Cupcakes Mark II were also a pile of shite. My sister called to say instead of rising, they’d expanded out of their little recesses and formed unsightly muffin tops, and that they’d tasted like fish and chips. I tried to be all sympathetic on the phone but actually, I feel like rejoicing. This is vindication that they were awful recipes and we had absolutely nothing to do with their failure.

Hurrah!

This means there is still hope for me. I do still have the potential to be super-mum (once I get a new oven and decent recipes etc). And most importantly there is still time to go out and buy packet mix and produce a reasonable result before Saturday afternoon, thereby winning back cousin K’s respect.

We’re thinking of taking the fish n chips flavoured cupcakes over to the shop where this woman works though and stuffing them in her meter box/letter box/exhaust pipe. I’m not childish, but I do believe in cupcake karma.