(Foam) Heart Attack!

Trying to channel my inner Martha Stewart, I whipped up a batch of cupcake batter. OK OK, it was a boxed mix (Martha FAIL!) BUT I made the butter cream frosting from scratch (Martha WIN!) My first round was an attempt at heart shaped mini-cupcakes. I put little wedges of tin foil in the side of each to make a heart-ish shape. Well Martha FAIL! on that because I filled the cups too high and they baked up over the edges and most of them looked round. I ditched that idea and baked a 'normal' pan of 24 mini-cupcakes and ended up back in the WIN! column. Then somehow the idea of heart picks came to me. So I grabbed Jake's tub of foam hearts and a box of toothpicks and peeled and stuck (and peeled and stuck and....). That was clever of me so I took it up a notch and printed some little sayings in a cute font and cut them out. I used the 'frame' hearts with a large solid heart as the backing and liked that result too. So I'm going to give myself an A-...Jake played with the 'bad' first non-heart-shaped batch (a pirate ship full of cupcakes? ARGH!) and I frosted and stuck another 24 minis and even pulled off a few regular sized cupcakes with the remaining batter. Homemade frosting and heart thingies make up for the Betty Crocker made cake AND they were at least a pretty Valentines-y cherry chip!