One Down, Nine to Go!

Are you tired of hearing about cupcakes yet? I really am not THAT much of a baker, but if I keep finding cupcake contests I may have to become one! The folks at Scharffen Berger Fine Artisan Chocolates are holding their annual Chocolate Adventure Contest. I heard about it last year, but it was so open ended, create any kind of a recipe using chocolate and several "adventure ingredients" that I didn't know where to begin. This year, it is a cupcake contest. Just cupcakes and one of the special ingredients was molasses. I JUST made up a cupcake recipe that involved chocolate and molasses! I was ready to enter and then I read the rules. Grandma Wulfers' number one rule for entering contests is READ the RULES carefully! Any recipe that has been involved in any other contest could NOT be entered. Makes sense, so I scratched the idea of entering the Gingerbread Hot Cocoa Cupcake. Unfortunately for my family, who on the down side has not seen me.. nor had a home cooked meal.. not had any laundry done in two days, I was already hooked and thinking about chocolate and cupcakes and molasses and cupcakes and bee pollen and ricotta and chili powder and beets and all the other cookoo crazy adventure ingredients. I definitely function better when presented with a limiting challenge.

So here is cupcake #1, as in my current favorite cupcake/breakfast food (oh yeah, we TOTALLY ate these for breakfast today!), as in my first entry into the contest. This is the Buttermilk Bacon Cupcake with Chocolate Maple Molasses Frosting topped off with a piece of BACON!!! I took a buttermilk biscuit recipe and added egg and sugar to make it more cake like. Wish me luck and stay tuned. I can enter up to 10 recipes and with a TEN THOUSAND dollar grand prize why not increase my odds! I have until midnight tonight to enter all of my recipes, and to get ready for school to start up again tomorrow, so I am about to dive back into the kitchen. More on what I come up with later.