For the last two years, I’ve made Halloween cupcakes for the party. I’ve gotten lots of votes for them, but I don’t end up winning. This book, Hello, Cupcake! has lots of ideas for cool cupcakes to bring to the party, but I don’t think I’m going that route this year.

Tofu and Cupcakes tried the werewolf recipe from this book last year:

• Tofu and Cupcakes » Blog Archive » Werewolf Cupcake from Hello, Cupcake!

The werewolf got rave reviews…but I can tell you that the ones from the book look 100% better than mine! I should have gone with a stiffer icing (like Swiss meringue buttercream), I used Hershey’s “Perfectly Dark” chocolate buttercream. The book detailed a method of the “fur technique” using a regular ziplock bag as a pastry bag. They even used two-toned frosting on theirs.

Her cupcakes look pretty good:

Considering how steep the competition is every year for the potluck award, maybe I should put a little more effort into my costume instead.

Via: Craftzine.com blog: Werewolf Cupcakes

I got an email from Newspapergrl a couple of weeks ago:

Laura,
I don’t even like to bake but I’m in love with this blog today.
I thought of you when I saw her Halloween cupcakes.
Janet

She linked to Bakerella and the cutest Halloween cupcakes EVAR!

• Bakerella: Halloween Cupcakes

• Bakerella: Kitty Cat Cupcakes

I still haven’t decided what I’m going to bring to the Halloween party for my potluck dish. I have never even gotten a vote for my Halloween dishes, which makes me want to just bring something boring like the chili I brought last year. I thought for sure people would have voted for my monster cupcakes last year, but sadly, the giant Hostess Cupcake won instead.

With my choice of skull cupcakes or pumpkin cupcakes, I think I have a chance at the prize for best potluck this year.

• Skull Cupcake Pan – Pushin Daisies

• Pumpkin Cupcake Pan – Pushin Daisies

Now, I just need to learn how to do the frosting so it looks spooky!

Via: Popgadget Personal Technology for Women: Skull cupcake pan

Every year, we have a contest at our Halloween party for best potluck dish. Anyone who brings these cupcakes gets my vote, no matter what else everyone else brings.

• Wisdom of the Moon: It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year

The variety of cute and funny cupcakes that she had made just makes me smile and be excited for the Halloween party this year. I can’t wait to see what everyone will be bringing!

Via: Craftzine.com blog: Monster Halloween Cupcakes

• Checking out the Tech museum. Walk down memory lane. (@ Tech Museum of Innovation) http://4sq.com/3bpTcQ #
• I kind of expected the Tech museum to be a museum of technology (old computers and stuff). http://twitpic.com/1f5sv8 #
• I didn't expect a cheap ripoff of The Exploratorium. Disappointed. #
• RT @SeagullFountain Um, who in their right mind would choose a McD cupcake over a Bavarian pastry? http://tinyurl.com/ybnczca #
• Apparently, I should have gone to the Computer History Museum in Palo Alto. I guess I'll try that on Wed. since they're not open today. #
• I'm at San Jose Museum of Art (110 S Market St, at San Fernando St, San Jose). http://4sq.com/4Jlml0 #
• I'm out of luck today. Back to the hotel to kill zombies. http://twitpic.com/1f609c #
• I'm out of luck today. I guess I'll go back to the hotel and kill some zombies. http://twitpic.com/1f62qt #
• Video of the friendliest rodent in San Jose. I can't believe how unafraid he was! http://tinyurl.com/y36n2yb #
• Thwarted in art and science, I resort to alcohol. It's always waiting for me. (@ Tanq) http://4sq.com/8THx05 #

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• Most adorable melted snowman cupcakes: http://tinyurl.com/5tzbb5 #
• @nakedjen Missing you too. Apparently I have no motivation to exercise on my own. I’ve been forcing myself. #

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• Spider cupcakes http://tinyurl.com/5eqfru #
• @extralife I have Xbox 360 and PS2. I use the Wii more than both of them. #

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Here is a roundup of food ideas from Craftzine last year:

• Craftzine.com blog: Spooky Ghost Meringues Recipe

• Craftzine.com blog: HOW TO – Make Spider Cakes

Last year, I made Monster Cupcakes based on the Craftzine article:

• Pick Me! » Monster Cupcakes

I actually liked how mine turned out better. I used fruit leather to cut out the tongues (instead of taffy) and I used a pastry bag and tip to apply the frosting so it looked like fur. I had many Elmos, Oscars and Grovers for everyone to eat.

Note to self: Do not stay up until 2am the night before making four dozen cupcakes. People only ate one dozen (despite the fact that over 50 people showed up). There was so much food to compete with my cupcakes that not everyone got to try one.

I was up until 2 am last night making monster cupcakes for the Halloween party. It’s only 2 pm and I’m worried that no one will show up.

Every year I worry and every year we are so packed that there’s no room to move. I don’t know why I worry. Even if only Stacey and Dan show up, it would be a rockin’ party.

I wish I could turn off the worry gene.

Part One

Today is my birthday. I wrote this entry last Friday because I actually want to take a rest from writing on my birthday. Let’s hope I had a nice weekend with my family and that I’ll have a nice day today with Mike.

On April 2^nd this year, my mom called me, “What are we doing for your birthday?” I sighed and realized that it was already April, “I don’t know. I haven’t really thought about it at all.” She was surprised, “You haven’t? Why aren’t you obsessing over your birthday?” I just laughed and told her that it was because it wasn’t Halloween. We don’t get to dress up for my birthday.

It took Mike a couple of years to realize that my birthday is a big deal. I don’t want a huge party. I don’t want a bunch of strangers in a restaurant singing a kitschy song at me with my free dessert and a sparkler. I want a quiet party with my family and I want everyone to care about me the most.

My mom didn’t even realize how important my birthday was until the horrible year that she sold the <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags” />West Valley house. It was my birthday and I was supposed to go to lunch with them, but mom, Carol and Stacey put it off. They were busy cleaning out the house. They told me to come a couple hours later after they were through getting the house ready for the realtors and then we would do my birthday afterward. Mike and Carol hid in the basement while the fight raged upstairs. When Mike finally ventured upstairs, he was able to explain to my mom how important my birthday is. I never want to be put off for a couple of hours. It’s my special day, respect it, dammit.

This year I do feel much more casual about it, though. It’s almost like I realize that I’m not missing out on anything. I’ve experienced all that birthdays have to give me. I’ve eaten enough frosting coated cupcakes to make up for the ones that I missed in grade school. I’ve had the slumber party, even though it was several years late and the late night antics entailed calming Trudy Rushton down from her Thriller Nightmare. I’ve had the drunken parties with friends at the clubs. I’ve had the quiet parties with family. I’ve had the birthdays when family fawned over and adored me. I’ve had the birthdays when we fought and screamed and cried. I don’t feel like I’ve missed out on anything anymore. I’ve made up for all of those Jehovah Witness years somehow.

It’s not like I dread getting older. I have enjoyed every age that I’ve encountered so far and if my mom is any indication of how I’ll age in the future, I’m happy to go there. Plus, the only other option is death. I’m happy for my birthday. I’m happy to be 35 years old. I’m just not obsessing over my birthday, trying to make the one perfect day to make up for all those years when I didn’t have birthdays. Maybe it’s the fact that I have had more Non-Jehovah Witness Birthdays than Jehovah Witness Birthdays now. I really only missed out on six birthdays, it’s just that they were those six birthdays when birthdays actually meant something. It took me a long time to grieve those six small years, but I think I’m finally over it now. For the life of me, I don’t know how I did it, but I finally feel like I’ve had all the fun that birthdays have to offer. Lucky Me!

Tomorrow is my birthday. I was born April 12, 1969, so I will be 35 years old tomorrow. I am writing this entry on Friday, April 9^th, so I have no idea whether it’s a happy birthday to me or not. My family birthday parties are over the weekend, so I don’t know how any of them are going to turn out. No, that’s not the correct grammar. Will haven being turned out? I can’t remember my grammar for time travelers. I need to read The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy again. Maybe I’ll understand it this time.

Growing up Jehovah Witness really fucks up how you view your birthday as an adult. My last birthday before we became Jehovah Witness was held in secret at my grandma’s house. My grandma, grandpa and mom had the birthday for me and I got a strange game with lots of little people as the playing pieces. If I saw it today, unscathed, I probably wouldn’t be able to recognize it. I didn’t play with it in its intended fashion. I just played with the little people like they were Barbies. Who says you have to follow the rules with your toys? Not me.

I remember being told not to tell my dad that we had a birthday party because he would be angry with us. I would not have another birthday party until sixth grade, but I didn’t know that when I was four years old. All I knew was that I had a cool game with all of these little people. I controlled their lives.

It wasn’t until I got into school that birthdays became a painful subject. I don’t know how the schools treat birthdays in other areas, but at Academy Park Elementary, birthdays were a little twisted. On your birthday, you brought treats for everyone in your class. Instead of receiving treats and presents, you brought them for everyone else. I remember my classmates walking up and down the aisles of the classroom, handing out hand made cupcakes or brownies or tiny bags of candies. I remember knowing that I would never be allowed to be in their place. I would never be that special girl, walking up and down the rows, handing out special treats that my mom made for my friends.

Most of the time, it was really easy to turn down the treat. The threat of Armageddon was far more important than a tasty treat in the afternoon. No thank you, cupcake. No thank you, brownie. I’ve got a Final Battle to survive. Every once and awhile there would be an amazing treat that I couldn’t say no to and I would wallow in the guilt of sin. I remember once while licking the incredibly thick frosting off the top of a truly scrumptious cupcake, one of the supremely evil children asked why I never bring treats. I told them that I couldn’t celebrate my birthday because it was against my religion. He was kind enough to point out my hypocrisy. I think that’s why I hate hypocrites to this day: I know how shitty it feels to live there.

Like bookends, my eleventh birthday was also held in secret. When my parents got divorced, the divorce decree stated that we could choose which religion we wanted to follow on our twelfth birthday. They were divorced between fifth and sixth grade, so I had one birthday in secret. Mom and Carol had a nice little party for me. It was a quiet, family affair and I lived in fear that Stacey would tell my dad. I shouldn’t have worried. She had learned to keep secrets by then. It was essential when you lived under my dad’s reign.

On my twelfth birthday, I told my dad that I didn’t want to be Jehovah Witness anymore. I didn’t want to go to meeting and I didn’t want to go to assemblies and I was going to celebrate holidays. He tried the Armageddon thing to guilt me into acquiescence. The end of the world still seemed very real to me, but I had learned long ago that I was just going to die with the sinners. I couldn’t say no to a cupcake back in third grade. How was I going to spend an entire lifetime missing out on the fun? No way, I told myself. I was going to run for eighth grade vice president.

It wasn’t until ninth grade that I had a real birthday party. My mom let me invite several girlfriends over for a slumber party. We had hogi sandwiches and we watched The Making of Michael Jackson’s Thriller on the video machine that my mom rented for us. I got some smelly pencils from one of my girlfriends and Trudy Rushton woke up in the middle of the night. She had a nightmare about Michael Jackson or maybe it was the zombies that were chasing him. I don’t know.

I always felt like I was missing out on the fun. I wasn’t allowed to go to other children’s birthday parties. I wasn’t allowed to partake of the treats that came at least once a month. I wasn’t allowed to celebrate my own birthday. Screaming young girls in party hats shaped like dunce caps. Lack-Of-Sleep slumber parties. Huge birthday cakes devoted entirely to me. All of this was out of my reach. I felt like I had missed out on all the good that life had to give.

No time to talk about April Fool’s Day. I’ve got more interesting things to talk about than practical jokes.

caffeine withdrawals, caffeine withdrawal, caffeine withdrawal headache, how do i quit soda, how to quit soda, sprite soda carbonation, caffeine addiction withdrawal, caffeine headaches soda, caffeine withdrawal cold turkey, caffeine withdrawal remedies, advice on quitting caffeine

Hands down, the most searches hit me because I wrote the entry about how to quit soda. When I was quitting soda, there was no help on the Internet because there are so many herbal remedies trying to get your business. I guess my entry was the one voice that wasn’t trying to sell you anything. I hope it helped you guys.

cupcake, computer term for cupcake, #mormon cupcake   Ok, I’ll bite. What do these searches mean? Is “cupcake” a new slang for something that I wasn’t aware of before? Doing these searches taught me nothing I didn’t already know. Cupcakes are little cakes in paper cups. If there is a computer term for cupcake, I wasn’t able to find it and obviously neither were those poor searchers.

I did find a story about a guy that is using misspelled domain names to generate advertising dollars. This guy has registered thousands of domain names, each one housing thirty or forty pop-up ads. He makes a lot of money because of stupidity and poor typists. All the more reason to study up, learn to type and use Google instead of typing in what you think the domain name is. Cupcake was a hit because the guy registered a bunch of cupcake sites (i.e. Cupcake Party, Cupcake Patrol, etc.). I wonder if this is what those people were looking for. It doesn’t explain the Mormon thing, though. In fact, it makes me think that “cupcake” is some new slang for something pervy.

I found a really cool technical paper regarding The Cupcake Problem. I only understood the first page of this thing and it got all mathematical on me, so I stopped reading, but it showed me that there are people working on things that I never even conceived of. The Cupcake Problem is a study in which a younger child is given a task by an older sibling (who is in cahoots with the researcher). The older sibling says that they have just put some cupcakes in the oven and they need to be taken out in 30 minutes. It’s ok to keep playing on the X-Box, but you need to take out the cupcakes on time, got it? The researchers watch the younger child during that half hour, observing the number of times the child checks the clock. All of this has to do with calculating monitoring activities. It got really technical really quickly, but it showed me that there are cool people out there. Rock on, Paul Cohen, Marc Atkin and Eric Hansen.

I did find a funny site recreating the Janet Jackson fiasco in cupcake form. I found a news brief about a boy who drugged Mormon missionaries with cupcakes, but that was back in 2000. There was also a reference to the movie Orgazmo, in which a Mormon missionary is introduced to the porn industry. This movie was a hit at the underground theater here, but I never saw it. It sounded like it might be a little negative and I don’t really play that way. Apparently, “Cupcake” is the pet name for the missionary’s girlfriend back home. I wonder if that was it.

<?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags” />st john climacus, patron saint of obesity

Apparently, I’m not the only one looking for the Patron Saint of Obesity. I’ve had several hits with these search strings. Keep fighting the fight, searchers. It’s worth it.

%22gathering randomness%22

They found me on page 6 of the Google search. I don’t know if they found what they were looking for. These sorts of searches make me think that I don’t know what is going on. Do the percent signs mean anything? What about the number 22? The only reason I showed up is because there was a little note at the bottom of my entry about Gathering Randomness for the previous date. Is the percent sign some sort of wild card? Why didn’t they search for the number 42? I guess if they knew the meaning of the universe, they wouldn’t be searching.

bathroom exhaust fans stopped working

I have no idea what this person was looking for. I waded through seven pages of websites that were perfectly willing to tell me how to fix the problem. Maybe they were looking for someone who could fix their exhaust fans. Maybe my entry enticed him. This is how my entry looked at Google, “… for a second or two and then final darkness and an eerie quiet that I have never heard in that bathroom. The ever-turning exhaust fan had stopped turning. …” I didn’t know that my entry about Friday the Thirteenth would bring people because of the bathroom exhaust fan. How glamorous.

what does the dragonfly symbolize

Yes! Two people on this planet found my entry on dragonflies. They found my entry explaining exactly what I had been looking for. I had been wondering, “What does the dragonfly symbolize?” No single site was able to help me, but now, my entry is there for all those people in the future who want to know the same thing. Hint for the kids at home: dragonflies mean nothing or everything, depending on how superstitious you are and how much weed you smoke. Stay clean, kids.

iris/goddess

Honey, I think you were looking for Isis, not Iris.

That’s it for me. Let’s do this again next month!

Cognitively, fourth grade is THE year for Halloween. All fourth graders want to be firemen, ballerinas and pirates. It is the year for dress up. That year, I didn’t dress up. I had never dressed up, but it was particularly hard to go to school on Halloween. Fourth grade didn’t qualify as the worst Halloween memory ever, but it was close. I remember Dylan came as a Vampire/Devil. He thought it was so cool to mix those two icons into one Halloween costume. I came as nothing and sat in envy at my desk reading the biography of Davy Crockett while everyone else toured the school for the Halloween parade.

I must have attended the Christmas party. I have no recollection of it, so it must not have been that cool. I suspect that my teacher gave us cupcakes or something. I’m sure I ate the cupcake, trying to evade my guilt in favor of my sweet tooth. Maybe I took the Santa head off the cupcake so that I could pretend it was just a normal cupcake. I don’t remember.

It was Valentines Day that I wasn’t expecting. It happened right at the end of the second term. I had busted my butt, coming to school while sick and through those horrible holidays. Valentine’s Day didn’t even phase me. It hadn’t even been a blip on my radar. It was going to be just one of those silly holidays like Columbus Day. I would have to sit quietly while the other students made frilly hearts. Maybe I would bring the biography of Benjamin Franklin to read to keep myself busy. Then it was smooth sailing to the end of the term and that shiny certificate.

The vision of that shiny certificate became pale and indistinct on Valentine’s Day. I sat at my desk during the exchanging of the Valentines. I was quiet and near tears. Everyone was receiving Valentines from their friends saying, “Bee my Valentine” with a picture of a bee. Or maybe they said, “If you carrot all, you’d be my Valentine” with a picture of a smiling carrot. There was candy in some of the Valentines. Some of the parents brought cupcakes with candy hearts on the top saying, “Be Mine.”

I had to reject all the Valentines. I had to tell my peers why I didn’t have a box. I even said no to the cupcake from the mother who sometimes attended our class and helped the slow readers. I was a good Jehovah Witness girl because I had seen pictures of Armageddon and I didn’t want to die in a flurry of fiery rain just because I couldn’t say no to a cupcake.

I was just trying to hold on. If I could just hold on until I got home, I would be fine. I was walking home with my friend, Trudy Rushton. She was the good Mormon girl on Royal Anne Drive and my mom liked me to be friends with her. Right as we got to her house, she stopped and faced me, “I know you’re not supposed to get these, but I couldn’t let Valentine’s go by without giving you a Valentine’s Day card.” She handed me a tiny Valentine in a white envelope. I took it, choked out a thank you and ran the rest of the way home, leaving her at her house.

I can’t remember what the Valentine said, but she had written on the back, “You’re my best friend.” I cherished it, even though it might mean my demise in Armageddon. I showed it to my mom and asked her if I could keep it. She said I could, but I could never let my dad see it. I knew what that meant. If he found out that I had brought a Valentine into the house, he would think that it was “demonized” and destroy it. My beautiful little Valentine would be destroyed before my eyes if Dad found it. So I hid it.