Penguin Power

In the early part of the year my granddaughter developed a passion for anything penguin. I started collecting penguin items for her birthday in June. In the spring amongst the non-fiction offerings comes this incredible book called “Hello, Cupcake!” by Alan Richardson. On the back cover they had a cupcake penguin. Not just one that was drawn on, but a three dimensional honest-to-goodness penguin! I read the directions and it didn’t seem hard and even better according to the directions, it would only take me an hour and a half to make 8 penguins. Cool! So starting on the Thursday before my granddaughter’s Saturday birthday I made the cupcakes. The book explained that due to the weight of some of the projects, they required a denser cupcake and that’s the recipe I followed. Then on Friday night shortly before 7 pm, I started on the penguin production. And finally a little after 10 pm, I finished.

While the book was really clear on instructions, there were some things they did not fully explain. For example, the penguin was made from half a mini-doughnut and a doughnut hole on top of that, which of course, was on a cupcake. You were to put frosting between these elements to hold them together and then dunk them in icing that had been heated to make it more liquid. I had difficulty getting the icing to the correct liquid state to easily accomplish this. As a matter of fact, on my first attempt everything fell apart and I had to fish the mini-doughnut and the doughnut hole out of the icing because they fell off. I discovered toothpicks were required to hold it together or as my husband and later in the book suggested, pretzel sticks are the answer to that problem.

However, it was all worth it to see the expression on my granddaughter’s face when she saw the penguins in all their black and white glory. And in looking at the photos, you’ll notice one is a little melted. It just slid apart and so we said that was a Chernobyl penguin..