Altough I really like to eat cupcakes, it turns out I'm not very great at decorating them. A late night adventure last night led to watching season 4 of House on DVD and making cupcakes. By the time I found some instructions and made the cupcakes and decorated them, it was well past midnight. I wish I'd been able to create little gems of perfection, but no. My cupcakes are homely. They're not even good enough to be home made. They're just homely.

I'm not entirely sure how the whole thing started, but I found myself at Bulk Barn at a few minutes to close looking for cupcake ingredients. I stood in front of the cake decorating section for a long time. Then I found the Wilton Lesson 1 Discover Cake Decorating kit. It was $30 and I was pretty sure I'd hit on the gold mine of cake decorating genius and instruction. It came with everything I'd need to make little flowers and little bears and it seemed just perfect. When I got home I found out that the kit doesn't actually home with instructions.

It would be unfair to blame the kit for this pile of icing sugar..on the other hand: What kit doesn't come with instructions?! The second batch faired a little better (although it wasn't me decorating these ones):

The recipe was Wilton's Basic Yellow Cupcake and the icing sugar was French Buttercream Icing.

A lot of internet searching later and I was still trying to find the very basics of how to put the tips into the bags and make ... well .. something useful. I did find a lot of recipes I'd like to try in the future, but I'm still looking for cupcake decorating instructions. If you've got suggestions, I'd love to hear them. In the mean time, here's a few of the recipes I may be trying some time in the future:

• Martha's Devil's Food Cupcake (chocolate with chocolate icing)
• Martha's Peanut Butter and Chocolate Frosted Cupcakes
• Pomegranate Mojito Cupcakes
• Brown sugar frosting

You should also take a look at The Cup Cake Blog and tongue 'n' cheeky (because it has excellent photos of delicious looking food).