Cupcakes

Elijah is the sweetest boy ever. Yes, he has his naughty moments (check the HamannEggs archive for details) and is occasionally brutal to Luca. But in his gooey center he is simply the nicest child ever.

Case in point: He wanted to make cupcakes for his class for the last day of school. This was not an assignment. Not a thing you sign up for at the beginning of the year and regret. Eli simply wanted to do something nice for everyone. Because it was a nice thing to do.

Who does this?

These cupcakes were no Pillsbury box effort. Eli wanted to make them from scratch. Apparently, this involves purchasing a giant Amazon box filled with measuring cups, sifters, cake pans, digital scales, and ten of those little things you squeeze icing through. But we gladly okay any Eli purchase that doesn’t involve weapons.

I arrived home the other night to a giddy Luca, who said, “Dad. Wait until you see what happened with the cupcakes!”

What happened with the cupcakes is Eli had a little measuring mishap, resulting in the bubbling over of much batter all over our oven. There was thick, burned goop everywhere. On the grates, the floor, the door, the neighbor’s roof. Everywhere.

“Whelp,” I said. “It’s the thought that counts.”

Eli had the same look Diana gets when she wants to bomb every tick in Michigan. There was no talking him out of it. Since the cupcake stuff was all used up, he wanted to make sugar cookies and decorate them.

Okay. But first, he had to clean out all the burned goop from the oven so the fire department didn’t pay us a (another) visit. Eli suggested I take goop duty. I informed him when he became a world famous chef with a hit TV show, he’d have a whole staff to clean up his messes. Until then, there’s the steel wool.

He did his best cleaning up. But the goop was angry and did not want to move. It was almost 10pm, so I said let’s just throw the cookies in there and hope for the best.

For the next 20 minutes of baking time, we raced around the kitchen, feverously guiding plumes of thick black smoke away from our smoke detectors. We had every window open and ran around with dual kitchen rags whipping over our heads like helicopter blades.

Thankfully, Evanston’s bravest didn’t have to come over and the cookies turned out pretty great. I ate several to make sure they weren’t poisonous.

The cookies were a hit and possibly influenced his teachers to give him all A’s. Which meant I had to hit the ATM on the way home.