I am such a sucker.
I forget that the Martha Stewart franchise taps into the desire to create a beautiful, tranquil home but not the reality. Who would ever, for instance, hand sew linens into a cover for trivets? Do you know what I'm even talking about? The pads you put down on the table to keep hot plates and serving dishes from burning the table. She has a how-to make linen covers for trivets entry on her website. I remember a few years ago she had an idea in her magazine about hosting a dinner-- she suggested slicing rings from a tree for placemats. Like, chop down a tree and slice it into thin slices of round wood to put under your table settings. How do you even hostess a party like that? I assume making people comfortable is a large part of being a good hostess. How do you make hand-hewn placemats welcoming? "Oh, the placemats? It was nothing. I just hacked down a Redwood before I diced the tomatoes for the gazpacho."
I do get sucked into it, though. Even now I'm wondering if it would really be all that hard to sew a few linens together.
Tallulah, too, has been drawn into the Martha Stewart spell. She likes to flip through my Martha Stewart Kids magazines and talk about the things she wants to make. Somehow she resists the linen covered crafts and goes straight to the sweets. When my sister came to visit, I told her to pick out a recipe we would make together to celebrate Auntie Kimmie's visit. She chose this:
Adorable, right? Looks easy, right? I mean, I'm not expecting Tallulah's decorations to look like Martha's, but with the candy as the main flourish, how hard can it be to make something that resembles a clown?
This is what we came up with:
I fully admit I used candy corn instead of gumdrops because candy corns are more delicious than gumdrops. Which can explain why our cupcakes don't look exactly like Martha's. But how to explain the fact that my clown cupcake looks like the Stephen King psycho killer version of what a clown can be? We had to eat them-- fast-- just so we wouldn't have to look at them anymore.
And you know what, Martha? Your recipe sucked.
