It's my friend Sarah's birthday. Happy birthday, Sarah! I wish I could send you some cupcakes in the mail, but I think they would arrive in a sad state. So here are some to feast your eyes on.
We bought these for Stephen's mom's birthday earlier this month at Lulu's in the North End (for some reason, the website only seems to work in IE). It was a day much like today, rainy and cool but definitely spring. We walked through Haymarket on our way to the bakery and heard lots of funny conversations. One man, his arms so loaded with bags of produce that they were practically dragging on the ground, warned his wife, "You're gonna drive the Haymarket out of business!" A vendor chided an overly-picky customer: "You're not buying a car! It's lettuce, just lettuce." We hardly saw anything before we were swept away by the great river of humanity surging through the narrow aisles, but I noticed that the produce got progressively cheaper the deeper into the heart of the market we went. I guess that's your reward for fighting your way through.
Looking at these pictures, I can't wait to go back to Lulu's. There's another cupcake place just a few blocks from our house, but it's more expensive and not as delicious, in my opinion, although their flavors are pretty wild. Stephen had a mojito cupcake there once, with rum-soaked cake and mint lime frosting, and I had a lemony one that came with a fortune in the icing. I'm really into citrusy desserts lately. I've got some lemon bars in the oven right now. Baking for two is always tricky. Do you halve the recipe? Make the whole thing, and just eat as much as you can before it goes bad? We decided to make the full recipe this time, because the number of eggs (3) meant we either had to make one third of the recipe (too little) or two thirds, which would be a lot of confusing division of teaspoons and tablespoons for only a little less final product. Maybe I can take some of them to work. Or maybe I'll just...eat them all.
