Back to School

School starts on Monday! Yes, it's a short seven-week summer, but the kids get two weeks off in October, December and March. Plus, it's hot as heck out here so the kids may as well be in school.

Our PTO is having a welcome back luncheon for the teachers tomorrow and they're having these apple cupcakes for dessert. They're just vanilla or chocolate cupcakes frosted in buttercream and dipped in sanding sugar. A pretzel stick is the stem, and I piped green melting chocolate onto waxed paper in leaf shapes. That worked out a lot better than my original plan.

The first plan was to cut green fruit roll-ups into leaves. I don't buy fruit roll-ups so I didn't realize that they don't come in green. Probably because kids don't eat anything green. Anyway, my second idea was to make chocolate leaves. I went into my back yard and got 24 leaves. I washed them, and then painted the backs of them with melting chocolate. Nine out of 24 came out.Sure, they looked pretty good. But the process just isn't practical when you need to make four dozen cupcakes. Maybe if I just needed a couple of leaves to garnish a cake.... But I don't know. Those chocolate leaves smelled like the real leaves so they probably tasted gross. And might even have been poisonous. I tossed them.

So, I ended up piping the chocolate on the waxed paper. I've watched pastry chefs do it on Food Network Challenge so I thought I was qualified to give it a try. I got better and better as I went along.