Despite having the best laid plans, there are times when life decides to test you…Like when you have an order for cupcakes for a birthday party and you get a notice in the mail from the electric company letting you know there is a planned power outage in your neighborhood on the day you were planning to bake and decorate the party cupcakes. Yes, that really happened to me.

Luckily for me, I have a wonderful friend (actually I have many wonderful friends!), but one in particular who was gracious enough to let me invade her home and take over her kitchen for the day, and into the evening as it turns out, in order to complete my cupcake order.

When you bake in a new kitchen it is best to familiarize yourself with a different oven. Of course since I’m not a professional baker, I didn’t really think about checking things like oven temperatures, which any oven manual will tell you varies between ovens. So when my first batch of strawberry cupcakes burned on the bottom, I learned that lesson the hard way.  Also, it’s important to remember to take all your necessary tools. When you have to improvise, it doesn’t always come out the way you planned. It seemed as though everything from the baking, to the decorating took twice as long as it did in my own kitchen, which I didn’t anticipate and led to my friend making dinner for both our families. (Like I said I have great friends!)

I managed to get all the cupcakes baked, decorated and put into containers for the party the next day and went home to discover the electricity was never turned off and the planned power outage never effected our neighborhood. I know if I had started baking at home the electricity would have gone off and I’d have been left in a much worse predicament.

Ironically, the theme for the party was “Alice in Wonderland”, so after feeling like I fell down the rabbit hole, without any real direction, becoming a little “mad”, and having to think on my feet, everything in the end turned out okay and the cupcakes were a hit the next day.

*Cupcakes pictured are Strawberry cupcakes with Strawberry Cream Cheese filling and Strawberry buttercream frosting and Vanilla cupcakes with Lemon Curd filling and Lemon Mousse frosting