Weekend Cooking for Mother's Day

Okay, we admit it.  A Reader's Respite hasn't been reading much this Mother's Day weekend.  Instead, we've been baking.  Now despite all you've heard about A Reader's Respite's sad, sad baking skills, we'd like to point out that just because we normally lack interest in it doesn't mean that we aren't capable when we put our mind to it.

With that in mind, we're happy to share our Mother's Day cupcake adventure with all of you....

Now in all seriousness, we're going to advise that you start this project with BOXED CAKE MIX.  Really.  By the time we get done with these babies, they're going to be so loaded down with frosting and decorations that you won't even be able to taste the cake part.  So do yourself a favor use the box mix, okay?

So we went ahead and baked up the cupcakes.  We made about 3 dozen using two different boxed mixes (we're feeding a crowd this weekend).  While those are baking up, grab your food coloring (admit it, it's been in your pantry for at least five years now....don't worry, it's still good) and tint up a few small bowls of plain white sugar.

After the cupcakes have cooled, go ahead and frost them with some pre-made frosting (again, make it easy on yourself).  Then grab yourself a bag of those tiny, colored marshmallows.  Cut the marshmallows in half diagonally and place them cut-side down into the sugar.

 Now we're going to take those marshmallows and start placing them in the frosting to make a Mother's Day flower....

Sound time consuming?  It is.  But it's so worth it when you end up with this:

Use different colors of marshmallows and sugars to make different colored flowers.  After about an hour or so, you'll end up with this:

Now we used green Twizzler licorice for the stems and also used a dab of frosting on the bottom of the cupcakes to anchor them to the platter so they don't slide around.

Frankly, A Reader's Respite only had the energy to make about a dozen of these today.  We decorated the rest of the cupcakes with various decorating tips:

And lest you think all of our cupcakes turned out this nice, we'll even let you take a sneak peak at our oopsie pile:

Y'all are welcome to stop buy and help us eat the oopsie pile.

Happy Mother's Day to each and every mom out there.  Your hard work is so very much appreciated, even if it takes twenty years for your kids to tell you!