How to Bake a Red Smoosh Cake

Step 1: Decide on a whim and a craving to bake the red velvet cupcakes you saw in an ad in Parents magazine.

Step 2: Go to Safeway to purchase cupcake fixin's. Decide not to purchase cupcake papers, since you've had a box of them in the cabinet for years.

Step 3: Preheat low-end Reagan-era oven with uneven heating feature and turbo-burn capability to 350 degrees.


Step 4: Prepare red velvet cupcake batter.

Step 5: Dig out two muffin tins of varying composition and quality. Realize that your 50-count box of cupcake papers has been used to prepare 49 cupcakes of yore, leaving one solitary wrapper for your use. Decide that you can't deal with going to the grocery store three times in one day, and improvise by spraying the tins with Pam and liberally applying a coat of unfounded optimism.

Step 6: Fill muffin tins and place into aforementioned oven of dubious quality. Recipe instructions say to bake for 25-30 minutes; set the timer for 18 minutes just in case.

Step 7: Prepare delicious vanilla cream cheese frosting. Taste to confirm deliciousness. Mmm.

Step 8: At the smell of burning, open oven. Allow smoke to dissipate, then remove cupcakes. Curse profusely.

Step 9: Five minutes later, note that the timer has finally gone off. Interesting!

Step 10: Attempt to remove cupcakes from pan. Discover the true importance of cupcake papers. Find glimmer of hope in the fact that only one pan of cupcakes is burnt, and only on the bottoms, which aren't coming out of the pan anyway.

Step 11: Throw your less-burned mangled cupcake scrapings into a heap on a cooling rack.

Step 12: Smoosh a handful of cupcake scrapings into the bottom of a Pyrex bowl:

Step 13: Top with some globs of the delightful frosting:



Step 14: Smoosh in some more cupcake scrapings:



Step 15: Add another laying of frosting and sprinkles, because nothing covers failure like sprinkles:



Enjoy!