A Rainbow of Wonderful

For those of you who know me it's no surprise at all when you hear me say I love to bake. I bake all the time. It's therapeutic for me. (Not the eating part but the actual baking part.) Unfortunately I'm not a therapeutic cooker and I don't whip up a five course meal when I'm a little stressed out. Instead I bake cookies and cupcakes and muffins and all the stuff that your Mom always told you not to eat. How horrible is that?!?! But the one nice thing for me (although everyone else says it's odd) is that I don't necessarily like to eat what I bake. And it's not even that I don't like it. I make things I love. I just like to eat things that OTHER people make. Weird???

My kids have followed in my footsteps (yeah!) and also love to bake. They come in the kitchen with me and look at the recipes and help me gather all the ingredients. It's wonderful. It's time that we spend together. It's time that I can tell them stories about when I was a kid (and not the stories about walking 5 miles to school. The good stories about how I used to bake with my Mom too.)

So this past weekend we wanted to make cupcakes. My kids love cupcakes. Well, let me rephrase that. My son loves cupcakes. My daughter likes to lick the frosting off of them. But we wanted to jazz up our cupcakes so this is what we came up with... Rainbow cupcakes. Who doesn't like something colorful?!?!

A couple of years ago I gave up trying to not make a mess when my kids helped me in the kitchen. I used to wipe the counter off as soon as something spilled or would not let my kids add an ingredient because it was "too messy." Heck, now I let them go at it. It's more fun for them and it's definitely less stressful for me. And how better for them to learn than to try?!

So they measure and mix.

Cody even cracks the eggs for me. (I do have him crack them in a separate bowl so we can pick out all the egg shells.)
But when he got the second egg cracked without crushing the shell and breaking the yoke - you would have thought he just won the marathon. He was so pleased with himself!

We mixed up the cake mix. (We used a boxed white cake mix for these). Then we added the food coloring.


I wasn't too sure of this at first. The tubs of cake mix looked like slime.


We layered the different colors in the muffin tins. We weren't able to put in more than about 3 layers because of the size of the muffin pans. And we put all different combinations of colors in the cups.

Then we waited....


We were pretty pleased with our creations. And after adding frosting! Well, we thought we were ready to open up a shop. Okay, maybe not but we thought they turned out great!


And yes, I actually did eat some of these. They were delicious!


http://hoosierhomemade.com/