What Could be Sweeter for Valentine's Day Than an Iron Cupcake Recap?: Commemorating the Brewers, Badgers, Robins, Cherries, Beer, the North Woods, and Well, Other Things About Wisconsin.

On Sunday, February 12, we partnered with Sandy Ploy the Cupcake Queen, and also Discovery World to be part of the final Iron Cupcake Challenge, Wisconsin Eye Candy. Featured at the event were Karen Tack and Alan Richardson, the culinary artists behind Hello Cupcake, What's New, Cupcake?, and the just-released Cupcakes, Cookies, & Pie, Oh My! And yes, we have signed copies available for sale. One is even decorated with a little bit o' frosting.

The event (which sold out quite quickly so congrats to the winners of our free ticket giveaway) was a benefit for Pablove, and included a cookbook auction, and tee shirts from Too Much Metal Fred. But of course the stars were the baking teams that came together to highlight the highs and lows of Wisconsin cultural history (I guess the lows would be Ed Gein, who yes, was commemorated with raspberries and phyllo dough. I shall say no more about that.)

The new projects in Cupcakes, Cookies & Pie, Oh My, are simply amazing, and the authors brought their cupcake shoes, their emoti-pops, their taco dip pie, plus of course the wonderful pound cake sheep, featured on the jacket. The black sheep's disctinctive wool was created by dipping mini marshmallows in cocoa powder. And the olives in the taco dip? Those are cut up Crows (licorice-flavored Dots).

 The Powerpoint was great, but what is truly amazing are Richardson's stop-motion videos that turn recipes into animated cartoons. Some of these awesome videos will be available as an app in March. And someone has to investigate why the videos are active in the Kindle edition of the ebook, but not in the Google Books edition. Wah!

In addition to Tack and Richardson's cookbooks, we brought an assortment of cupcake stuff, including air fresheners, lip glass, boxed cards, magnets, wrapping paper, and so forth. Oh, and bubble gum.  I didn't worry about sell through as, having done this twice before, the cupcake stuff has proven to be quite popular at Boswell afterwards.

Perhaps the highlight of the day for me, despite really loving the hodag cupcake, was the young woman who came up to the desk and told us that Hello Cupcake was the reason she enrolled in culinary school.

So congrats to the winners. And once again, thanks to Sandy Ploy and her army of mint-ions, plus Discovery World, for a great event.