Project Food Blog - Challenge # 1

Sometimes the journey is the destination…

My blog is a journey through the cupcake universe. My initial goal was to carefully design a series of spontaneous cupcake adventures and write about them, but the project morphed into much more than that. I don’t blog to acquire a certain number of readers or to be linked to other sites. I blog about cupcakes because I love cupcakes. I am flattered and encouraged when readers take the time to comment on what I write, because my blog is about learning, sharing and interacting with others.

Participating in challenges to choose the next food blog star…put me in coach! No professional culinary training. Never been published. But what I lack in culinary arts and writing skills, I make up for with passion for my topic. I want what I write to resemble a conversation between two friends having coffee in the kitchen. I have outstanding cupcake days and not so successful ones, and I will share them all.  Project Food Blog is a little bit like American Idol or Survivor for food bloggers and my goal is to not get voted off the island the very first week. None of the challenges involves cupcakes, but I will hang on as long as I can!


So how did I decide to blog about cupcakes? A friend of mine makes fabulous wedding cakes but hates to make cupcakes. She got an order for wedding cupcakes and didn’t want to make them so she called me. I made 200 cupcakes, decorated them with fresh roses and displayed them on a metal plant stand that looked like a tree. I started getting calls for recipes and tips for displaying cupcakes. The rest may or may not be cupcake history.

A major inspiration for me as a food blogger is that I love how food is connected to memories…holidays, special events, family celebrations. My mom’s carrot cake at Thanksgiving, my uncle’s mincemeat pie (yuck!) at Christmas, my grandmother’s biscuits every day of the week (made with lard but oh so good), my aunt’s chocolate cake with seven-minute frosting (birthdays), and our neighbor's canned Coca-Cola ham for Easter. No matter what the food is or how much we like or dislike it, we associate it with the people in our lives and special times we have shared. Every family should create a cookbook of their own recipes (the destination) and make notes about how those recipes became traditions (the journey)...and of course every family tradition should include cupcakes!

Carpe Cupcakes! ya’ll….

cupcake art by P Davis Designs

Payton Davis (my niece)

the first wedding cupcakes by

Carpe Cupcakes!

tie-dyed cupcake batter

giant birthday cupcake

gingerbread cupcakes

flowerpot cupcakes