Sometimes I Fail

So I'm sitting here eating a can of bartlett pear halves because sometimes I fail. Today I thought I'd try my hand at making my own hostess type cupcakes. I wanted to take all the things that are wonderful about a hostess cream filled cupcake and amplify it by 84,000x. I wanted to find a really good devils food cake recipe, and make my own fluffy cream filling then top if off with a chocolate ganache. I would have even done a little white swirl on top. But I learned what happens when I get lazy with my baking. My kitchen wasn't clean, I didn't have all the ingredients I needed and I just didn't have the necessary oomph to fix those things. I went up to the Denny Market to try to get the things I needed but the Patron Saint of Baked Goods just wasn't looking after me today. Ok, I guess I should talk about the cake recipe I had found. Again, another example of laziness that did NOT pay off in the end. Just reading the ingredients should have turned me running in the other direction. Or at the very least I should have just taken a nap instead. Here they are:

Ingredients:

1 box devil’s food cake mix
1 small box Jello instant chocolate pudding mix (not the sugar or fat free kind!)
1 cup sour cream
1 cup vegetable oil
4 eggs, beaten
1/2 cup milk
1 tsp pure vanilla extract
2 cups mini semisweet chocolate chips

I know, I know... A box cake mix. But it had other things, and I thought it might work. And to be fair it may have (doubt it) worked but Denny Market is small, (more convenience store less grocery). They had milk chocolate cake mix, not devils food. They didn't have pudding, and I wasn't going to spend $5 on a bag of chocolate chips. I also needed powdered sugar for my cream filling and they didn't have that either. To top it off when I got home I found out I didn't have any more vanilla either.

To sum up the cake mix was awful, and the cream filling ended up being grainy (I tried to make my own powdered sugar by blending regular sugar but it was still grainy) I didn't even bother to make a frosting. I gave one to Justin and he said they tasted exactly like the hostess ones and I had to explain to him that my home made cupcakes should have tasted WAY better than their preservative filled, generic, corporate greed cakes. I need to educate this boy's palette. I will try these again, because I think I can do them great justice. I'll just make sure I have a clean space to bake in, all the right ingredients, and well researched recipes to work with.

Also? Dinner sucked. I ran out of olive oil and so I used a parmesan garlic salad dressing on my red potatoes and asparagus that I was roasting. I over roasted them, and for some reason (I blame the sauce) the BBQ chicken I did was pretty awful. So it's me and my can of pears now. At least they're delicious.

In my opinion this all just goes to show that baking and cooking need love just as much as they need sugar or olive oil. Lesson learned.