Yeah, this is as good as it gets.

Ahhh, cupcakes (Homer Simpson drooling sound)...



Don't you love my grandma's retro dishes? I love that in our second apartment together we both had cool dishes handed down from family members, and if I remember correctly both sets heavily featured orange flower patterns.

This is one of at least 3,578 things I have to thank you for: thank you for introducing me to Magnolia Bakery on our trip to New York. I think KC had told you that you had to go, so we went! We spent the morning walking from the Brooklyn Bridge, through lower Manhattan, to Battery Park, to the Irish Hunger Memorial (you didn't find the representation of fallow potato fields nearly as interesting as I did, but they're my people! The Irish are my people!) and wandering through the West Village to find the bakery. It was worth it! And now when I read about it everything online says the bakery became famous because it was in Sex and the City. I must have missed that episode. I'm so glad we took KC's advice and searched it out.

When Todd and I went to New York for the first time I dragged him to Magnolia, and I’m sure he was grumbling as it was our last day in the city and we had to head straight to the airport, but after he had a cupcake he agreed it was worth the effort. We carried a few cupcakes back on the plane, and T-Willy and I brought one to you on your lunch break at ER the next day.

So on our trip to New York in December we made time one night to go to Magnolia and get a few cupcakes to eat, a few to take to M and her roommates to thank them for letting us camp out in their living room, and a few to take on the plane. And we have been craving them ever since! I’m sure a lot of bakeries make excellent cupcakes, but I haven’t found any around here that are equally good. I find that often a cupcake only excels in one area, frosting or cake, but not both. That is why Magnolia is so good- every part is fantastic! And they taste like they are made of real, old-fashioned ingredients!

Last Saturday was one of those days where you have big plans to clean the whole house and wash the windows and organize the cupboards and darn some socks (I have no idea how to darn socks, I just like to say it) and instead you do a little work on a few things and then realize you want a cupcake. A really good cupcake, not something with pink Valentine’s Day frosting and dry, tasteless cake like you get in bakery case at Albertson’s. Not that I am above buying and eating such desserts, but I wanted something that tasted homemade. So I opened up the big red Betty Crocker’s Cookbook that my mom gave me (thanks, Mom! Full of so many good things- why didn’t I try to cook real food before?) and looked up a recipe for yellow cake. I also looked up buttercream frosting, and it has the same recipe my mom taught me when I used to try to “help” in the kitchen. So I made twenty-four yellow cake cupcakes with chocolate buttercream frosting on Saturday afternoon. On Monday morning there were only three left (see photo above), and none by Monday night. I think I had six of the 24. Turns out Todd likes cupcakes more than I do.



Real Magnolia cupcake, held by you, photographed by you, when you stayed with M in New York, August 2005.