Always_All_Ways

Yeah, his Motherless account got taken down years ago. Luckily, it has been archived. Here’s the archive.today link: https://archive.ph/2014.01.21-001858/http://motherless.com/u/nastynasty

I’ve been seeing dozens of Dolly Parton baking products at Walmart for almost a year now, so I figured, “what better time to buy some than now?” I ultimately settled on a tub of creamy buttercream to frost my cupcakes. 😋

The cupcakes came out a bit drier this time around, which I assume was the result of overcooking them a tad. I also made the mistake of adding too much batter, as opposed to last year when I didn’t add enough. To fix this, I had to saw some of them down with a butter knife.

Plus, my decorating skills still leave A LOT to be desired. All I can say is that I LOATHE using decorating gel, & having shaky-ass hands. 😑

However, despite some minor setbacks, I can confirm that this baking venture was still generally successful. They were pretty tasty, & my family enjoyed them quite a bit too (I dare not tell them who the cupcakes are actually for, of course). 🤫

Of course, I had to taste test my cupcakes, & I’ve gotta say, they came out quite nice (please excuse my loud chewing, & the Dua Lipa song in the background 🤭).

I used Pillsbury Funfetti chocolate cake mix, & it tasted perfect; pleasantly sweet, soft, & moist. Considering it was my first time baking, I’d say I did quite well. While I definitely need work on my design skills & penmanship (trust me when I say using writing gel is a lot more tricky than it seems), I generally liked the end result.

The only real issue I encountered was getting Ian’s age wrong on one of the numbered cupcakes. I had to carefully smear off my accidental 5 & try to transform it into a 7 (even though I was already starting to run low on white writing gel at that point).

I really wanted to do something special for Ian’s birthday this year, so I decided to make some Lostprophets-themed cupcakes! This was my first time baking on my own, so please go easy on me. I’ll admit, I certainly imagined them looking better in my head, however, I really did try my best. 🙏🏼

I colored the vanilla icing with black & red food dye, & I also made sure to use red & white cupcake liners in accordance with the color scheme. I probably could’ve put a bit more batter since you can tell they didn’t quite fill out the liners as much as they should’ve. I’ll be sure to keep that in mind the next time I do something like this in the future.