Song Lyric of the Day:
I hear in my mind all these voices / I hear in my mind all these words / I hear in my mind all this music /And it breaks my heart
Regina Spektor / “Fidelity”
11:23PM.
Rich landed safely in NYC this morning. We had to wake up at 3:50AM to make sure he got through security in time for his 6AM flight, the same one I’m catching on Saturday morning.
To celebrate having the house to myself 
(miss you bunches, honey!), Caren came over to make cupcakes and watch Ugly Betty. Caren found this recipe for Wicked Cupcakes on the Food Network’s website the other day. After talking a bit, we decided we wanted to try to make them. I mean, look at them–how cool do those cupcakes look?
Caren got to the house around 7:20PM. I gave her the grand tour before we started Operation: Wicked Cupcake. I ordered a pizza from Brunetti’s, put on a Michael Buble CD, and we got to baking. Let me tell you, making things from scratch is interesting. Also time consuming; I would’ve starved to death in the olden days from laziness alone.
The whole time Caren and I worked on making the cupcakes, Caleb stood between us, his snout pointed toward the counter and his eyes full of hope (“Dropsomethingdropsomethingdropsomething”). After lots of stirring and mixing, we got the cupcakes in the oven and settled down to start watching Ugly Betty while they baked. We’d just settled into watching the show when Caleb used his big-boy bark at exactly the same moment that the pizza delivery man appeared in our back door window. I screamed, Caren laughed, and I went to pay for the pizza. It was our regular pizza delivery guy; he said he just figured coming directly to the back door was a preemptive strike since Rich and I always go out the back way when he rings the front doorbell.
The cupcakes were baked and cooled by the time we finished dinner. We watched a bit more TV and then started working on making the frosting from scratch. The most challenging part was using food coloring to try to create different colors; we ended up with teal, orange, and green frosting. Caren’s attempt at making a witch cupcake just like the one in the photo didn’t quite work out — the cupcake cone for the witch’s hat crumbled. We then decided to just go with general Halloween-themed cupcakes: ghosts (really blobs with eyes), witches (with chocolate graham cracker hats), medusas, vampires, and spiders. Here are some camera phone shots of our culinary masterpieces (Rich has our digital camera with him in NYC): 
While they’re not remotely close to the Food Network cupcake photo, we know they’re delicious and will be appreciated by our coworkers. Caren’s taking a pan in and I’m taking the other one in to work tomorrow. Should be fun!
