Flower Practice...oh and chocolate cupcakes too!

Only the second week and I'm already late posting! With good reason though. So I went to Indy this weekend for Joey's graduation....from med school no less. Yea Joey! We had a blast, even with very little sleep. And upon our return Sunday, as tired and lazy as I felt, I still had the urge to bake. So I did. I made chocolate cupcakes. I'll post the recipe, as soon as I find out if it's okay. What I really wanted to do was play with frosting and practice making flowers, or at least blobs that look something like flowers. So, the cupcakes were really just a vehicle, a canvas, for that. Well, it's a good thing I didn't have any real expectation for the cupcakes, because they weren't that great. Mark, my resident taste tester, says they were chocolatey (is that a word?), but I wasn't so sure. Of course, I LOVE chocolate, so I'm probably not the best gauge on what's chocolatey for the average person. But that attribute aside, they were dry. And nobody likes a dry cupcake. It's possible that I overcooked them.....they went from soupy in the middle to toothpick coming out clean in a matter of minutes. But I really don't think I did. There wasn't any oil or applesauce or melted butter, etc. in the batter. Could that be the reason? I'll have to do some research on chocolate cake recipes. I've yet to make one that works for me. The last chocolate cake I made was a disaster....to me. Everyone at the party was really nice and said it was great, but I knew it wasn't great. It had melted chocolate in addition to cocoa powder and the melted chocolate seized on me. It was such a labour of love, it's a wonder I managed to salvage any part of it. See, even though I love chocolate....I have this fear of working with it. It's so temperamental and moody....like me at certain times during the month. ;-)
The buttercream flowers were fun though. I don't know that I've gotten the technique down pat, but I'm getting there. Not bad for one petal tip....that I had to keep switching between icing colors!

Sorry, the pictures are a bit blurry. I was in a hurry.