And she's off!!!

Off and baking, that is.  Not "off in the head" as some of you might have suspected.  Well, that is debatable I suppose.

So..........I've decided to come clean.  Go public.  Share with the world that I am addicted.

"Hi, my name is Tara and I am obsessed with cupcakes."

Totally obsessed.  I can't stop thinking about them, dreaming about them, researching them, reading the millions of other blogs about them, and - to my husband's dismay - talking about them.  So I am on a quest; a personal mission to make the best darn cupcakes ever.  Okay, maybe not EVER.  I mean, come on... 

All I know is that my brain is swimming with information on how to make the moistest cupcakes, the bestest frosting; which butter is the best butter for baking, and what is the best brand of extract.  And can how exactly do you use vanilla bean; and oh! how to make your own buttermilk.  Who knew?   So all the information is there and my evil plan to take over Kauai with my cupcakes is all mapped out - I even have my little marketing scheme.  There's only one key thing left to do:  Make the darn cupcakes. 

And when I say "make cupcakes" what I mean is that I need to learn how to make cupcakes.  And what I mean by that is that I sort of need to learn how to bake.  Don't get me wrong:  I can throw a cake mix together and whip out the old Betty Crocker canned frosting.  But to make the kind of oh-my-gawww-this-is-the-most-amazing-cupcake-ever kind of cupcake will take a little more expertise than I currently possess.  Such lofty goals.

A lot of you bakers out there have a long lineage of bakers or granny's recipes and what not.  I'm not one of you.  I don't have heartwarming stories of baking with my nana or secret family recipes.

Please pardon this emergency broadcast message (aka a note to my mother):  Dear Mom, Please don't be offended by this paragraph. You're a great cook and baker and I only wish I had been more interested in all this when I was younger!! I WILL be using your recipes and I'm going to say that they're secret even if they're not LOL. Now back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Okay, so no baking with nana or Martha Stewart, blah blah blah...Seriously folks.  I just learned the important difference between unsalted and salted butter (which led me on a quest to understand butter in general and I can't wait to search the island for this French or European butter that I've heard tell about.  But I digress...) I don't have any of that, but I do - for some reason unknown - have a total passion for the pursuit of the perfect cupcake.

I wondered the other day why this has hit me now.  I know that the whole cupcake craze has been going on for awhile now.  I'm slow, I know.  But why cupcakes and why now?  I think I figured it out. 

They're small.  Some of them are tiny.  I can fit them in one hand or even between a finger and thumb.  They are accessible, do-able, not overwhelming and maybe not really that lofty after all.  They're really just cupcakes. 

Just cupcakes.  I love it.