A Summer Spent Smug: Tres Leches Cupcakes

Cinco de Mayo may be one of my favorite holidays.  It included quesadillas, nachos, tequila, Alayna, and Hannah.  I spent the “weekend” in New Hampshire with one of my best friends.  Therefore, I missed my Latin American cupcakes by a week.  I made tres leches cupcakes this weekend, reminding me of the summer I spent doing nothing by a pool.  Oh, how I miss the times of doing nothing. 

Tres leches means three milks.  The three milks involved are evaporated milk, sweetened condensed milk, and “milk” (which in this case was heavy  cream).  I made the cakes veeeewey cawrefullwy.  Then I poked holes in them real quick like.  And then poured the mixture of milks on them.  I made a really boring whipped cream to put on top and sprinkled them with cinnamon.  They turned out delicious and reminiscent of lazy days spent reading Roald Dahl. 

These tastes and scents and memories make me think of when I thought I had the whole world figured out.  Who knows who they want to be with when they grow up?  I still don’t know what I want to do.  I don’t know who I want to be, or be with, or what I want to spend the rest of my life doing.  I am very lost now and the cupcakes make me laugh thinking about how I thought I knew everything just a year ago. 

Minions Assemble!: Goodbye Cupcakes for Kayla

Sometimes, it’s not about what it’s made with except if it’s made with love. 

A good friend of everyone at my restaurant left recently.  I wanted to tell her how much everyone loved her.  I wanted her to know she is beautiful, inside and out.  She deserves love that is wholesome and overwhelming and all-encompassing.  She deserves someone who is attractive and funny and nice.  She deserves a prince charming.  She doesn’t know she deserves all this.  She barely realizes how wonderful she makes the world by being in it. 

For Easter, she got Despicable Me.  She frequently said, “WHAAAAAAAAAAAT???” at work.  She made me laugh with it.  So, I figured a way to show her how much we all loved her was to make some minions tell her…

MINIONS! ASSEMBLE!

It was a process.  It took some Twinkies, some extras, lots of patience, chocolate sprinkles, black frosting, white frosting, and cupcakes.  It also took some twisting of arms to get people to write down what they enthusiastically took.  But it all got done on time.  It was finished and she cried and I think she understands a fraction of the way people felt about her.  Because we all love her and her silliness more than she’ll ever know.  I’ll miss the friendship we weren’t allowed to have because of strange factors and moving to a different state. 

On the back of each speech bubble, people wrote special messages to her.  Our kitchen manager taped a brownie to it because she used to eat them all the time.  The restaurant hasn’t been the same since she left and it keeps changing.  Her move kind of got me thinking that I need to make a change, too.  The minions in my own head are growing restless and bored.  We’ll see where my minions take me.