We knew we were getting new neighbors upstairs at the start of this month, and in an effort to make them like us so they’ll be nice to our ears, I decided to make cupcakes. And let’s be honest, I’ll use any excuse I can get to make cupcakes. Our landlord informed us earlier in the summer that they’d be college students. Immediately I wished for grad students. Preferably girls. Everyone knows that girls don’t party at home if they are inclined to be partiers. Only guys don’t care what their house looks like. And grad students are always much tamer than undergrads. I was ideally hoping for a college student who was like me.

Shortly after moving in, my mom (who had come out to help me move) heard rumors from the neighbors about our house. It was confirmed when Jaz and I met a lady down the street that our house is known as “the yellow house”. Having a name is never a good thing. Apparently the previous tenants over the last 5 years or so have been quite bad. Including having open fires in the side yard, weekend long parties, and numerous police reports. When we moved in, it seems everyone was quite glad that the house was taking a turn for the better. And when the upstairs people were kicked out shortly thereafter, it seems it wasn’t just us waiting to see who the new tenants would be.

So back to the cupcakes. I decided straight off the bat that they should either be chocolate or vanilla to be the most generic. I had bought vanilla wafers to make banana cupcakes a week or so ago, but I figured that probably wouldn’t be the most popular flavor. After combing my Pinterest board, I made the unheard of decision to do a repeat. I don’t usually like to make things twice because I always have so many new ideas that I want to try. However, these cupcakes needed a redemption.

The last time I made s’mores cupcakes was for the first meeting of Jaz’s and my parents. Like most of the normal, pre-marriage milestones in a relationship, Jaz and I hit this one fairly late. It came almost a year after we were married, right before our Michigan wedding. I will use any gathering as an excuse to make new things, so I found these s’mores cupcakes that I wanted to try from Baker’s Royale.  I have no idea what happened to the cupcake batter, but I could tell before I even put it in the oven that something was wrong with it. It made nowhere near as much as it should have, and it had the consistency of brownie batter. Which is pretty much what they turned out like, dense little brownies in a cupcake wrapper. With no time to try again, I went ahead with decorating them. I burnt my finger many times toasting the frosting. (I really should buy a torch, doing these things with an average lighter is not easy!) But I thought they turned out super cute, which at least helped with the fact that the “cupcake” was totally stuck to the wrapper.

Luckily I had made backup chocolate cookies, which were well received, and the family get-together went off without a hitch. (Minus the fact that Jaz’s family got turned around on the way to my parents and ended up taking an extra hour to arrive!) Jaz and I had come up with a game where the opposite family had to answer trivia questions about us, and everyone had many laughs over it.

From this experience though, and a few prior, I finally learned my lesson. If a Pinterest recipe calls for a basic chocolate or yellow cake recipe, I need to just use recipes that I’ve tried and enjoyed. Oftentimes I’m making something to take somewhere, and I can’t afford to try untested cake recipes when I have a lot that are fabulous in my recipe box. So for the neighbors, I found an old chocolate cake recipe and combined it with the marshmallow frosting recipe from Sweetopolita that I had used making Jaz’s birthday cake from the last post.

Saturday morning I made the cupcakes, and immediately encountered a problem with the frosting. It was too runny to pipe onto the cupcakes. It is very tasty frosting, but made more for a filling than for decoration. Even after adding at least twice as much powdered sugar, I couldn’t get it to hold up. So I abandoned the cupcakes to go out to the Hanson concert for the evening, figuring I’d deal with it later. Once I arrived home however, I discovered the new college kids had moved in (Jaz thinks it’s three boys and a girl) and were already having a party. So even after discovering that once chilled, I can pipe the marshmallow frosting, I’m debating whether the new neighbors deserve any cupcakes. We shall see. In the end though, the remade s’mores cupcakes may not be quite as cute as the originals, but are much tastier!