A social experiment with the Cupcake Twins--Part I

Sometimes an idea is hatched under the influence that might be potentially crazy and ridiculous, but because you are under the influence you know that it is undoubtedly the best idea you've had in your life. Ever.

This is how the Cupcake Twins were born.

A few weeks ago, a fellow single friend and I were out on the town, looking and feeling good, yet attracting nothing but married men. Perplexed, we put our big brains together figure out how we could change our luck and actually get single fellows to come our way. I won't take you through our entire thought process (as there was a lot of wandering around until we finally landed on the final product), but suffice it to say we boiled it down to the simple mind of a single man. Unsure on why we weren't attracting Mr. [Unmarried] Right to us, we decided we should reach into our bag of tricks and use an irresistible secret weapon: cupcakes.

That's right. Cupcakes. Our plan was a simple one, bake a batch of cupcakes and visit a couple of target-rich environments on a Friday night and use them to draw attention and open the door for opportunity. Brilliant! We agreed that we would only give the cupcakes out to those who were truly cupcake-worthy (first criterion: must not be married). Even more brilliant! We set dates for cupcake making and D (delivery) Day, and our plan was in motion.

Earlier in the week, I was sharing the plan with a group of friends (guys, gals, singles, couples) and right away one of the guys turned to me and said, "I'm not sure that will work. Girls like cupcakes. Guys like bacon. If you walked into a bar with a plate of bacon, you cannot lose."

I looked at him incredulously, as if I'm going to walk into a bar with a plate of bacon?! You know, because walking in with a platter of cupcakes is just so much more logical. But I did give his comment some thought because people do love bacon and you usually can't lose (unless those people happen to be vegetarians or vegans, and if they are, well then they probably aren't people that I would spend forever with because mmm-mmm, I love meat). My friend and I considered this new viewpoint and made executive decision number one: Bacon Cupcakes!

With a modified plan I hit the store to get supplies for cupcake making day and made executive decisions two, three, and four: instead of making mini-cupcakes we'd make normal-size ones becasue the store didn't have mini-cupcake tins, we would not be making cupcakes from scratch but would be making the box variety, and likewise, we would not be making a chocolate ganache when we could just use a ready-to-spread tub of frosting. Silly us had thought that we would wow people with our baking abilities and make homemade treats, then we realized nobody is really going to notice the difference and why put that much energy into strangers and a social experiment that could backfire. Plus I didn't want to do all those dishes. And we opened the box and combined the ingredients at home, therefore the cupcakes would be undeniably home-made.

So we busted out some "rich butter flavor" yellow cupcakes and added an unspecified amount of artificial maple flavoring (why splurge on pure maple extract, right?), frosted them with "rich chocolate" frosting and sprinkled them with bits of bacon. Admittedly the bacon was a splurge. In case you didn't know this, happy free-range pigs make for ridiculously yummy bacon, and if you have ridiculously yummy bacon on a cupake, you're probably more willing to overlook the fact that the cake has both artificial butter and maple flavoring and is so overloaded with sugar and preservatives because mmm-mmm, you love meat!

You're probably curious about how this social experiment turned out... and that will be Part II of this story. But just in case you were curious about how my house smells, it's smelled like pancakes, Log Cabin syrup, and bacon for two solid days now.