Potluck Cupcakes

More cupcakes! It's very surprising how popular and flexible cupcakes really are. They provide equal portions, so that no one fights over whose "slice" is bigger (although some do fight over the number of sprinkles, but that's just nitpicking), there's more flexibility as far as presentation and you can decorate each one individually if you really want. I just finished making these for a potluck at work tomorrow. I offered to make a salad, but they insisted that I make dessert. To tell the truth, I knew they would, but a girl likes to hear a compliment every now and then :) These are vanilla (from my now favorite recipe) with raspberries tucked inside and a lemon meringue buttercream. I made enough to bring to work and a few "imperfect" ones to take home to my poor sick sister who's bored out of her mind at home. A cup of tomato soup and a soft cupcake should make anyone feel better, right?

Oh, and there's a funny story about the cupcake stand in the picture too! So I've mentioned my current "affair" with Craig's list, well I saw a post on there for this stand at a fraction of the cost it normally goes for, and after a few emails back and forth with the seller, we decided to meet at the nearby park where her son had soccer practice. I went with a friend and since I've never been there before, so I got a bit turned around and when I finally found the park, I discovered that I was in the wrong parking lot. I didn't want to risk getting lost while driving around trying to find the right parking area, so I got out of the car, left the keys in the engine and my friend in the passenger seat, called the lady on my cell and took off on foot to try to find her. Mind you, I never told my friend what I was doing, where I was going, or what we were there to do. So she's in my car, watching me disappear in a crowd of kids, on my cell phone and she thought that the most logical explanation for the whole situation was that I was there on a shady mission to "exchange money for merchandise". You know, the "it fell of the back of a truck" situation. Okay, so she didn't really think that, after all this is ME we're talking about, by the time I got back to the car with my shiny new cupcake stand, she had already called some of our friends and that was the story she kept on telling everyone for the rest of the evening. The moral of this story? Don't take your friends with you on "business trips", you'll never hear the end of it.