It's My Party and I'll Cry If I Want To

It was a good birthday! I felt very loved and very special. I think that's what birthdays are for.

A friend of mine sent me these tulips at work. They are gorgeous on my dining room table right now:



Now that I work in an education setting I have found that the old kindergarten rule of "bring your own treats to share on your birthday" still stands. Of course, if I'm going to bring treats to share they should be really cute treats. Thankfully, Martha Stewart's February issue came just in time to give me some inspiration:


I'm finding that I love colors that are similar and used in the same design. Kind of the "tone on tone" look. So, that's what I tried to do. I picked three different cupcake recipes: vanilla, chocolate and strawberry and topped them with my mother-in-law's white frosting, which I carefully dyed three different colors with food coloring. Then, I pulled out my new platter (Merry Christmas to me from Jesse) and lined up all the cupcakes. Here's the final result:


Okay, there was more cupcakes - as this amount would not have satisfied my office friends. There were 40 in all. My orange frostings are a little too close in color, so I might be the only one who can tell the difference. Oh well . . . it was late when I was trying to make the colors and frost the cupcakes, so there was going to be no "do overs". The lightest orange(bottom) went on the vanilla cupcakes. The orange (middle) went on the chocolate cupcakes. And the pink (top) went on the strawberry cupcakes.

The chocolate and vanilla cupcakes were my favorite. The chocolate one was from the Martha Stewart Living magazine (Feb. 2009) and the vanilla one was from allrecipes.com. Great recipe website!