The Cupcake Diaries Collection: Katie and the Cupcake Cure; Mia in the Mix; Emma on Thin Icing; Alexis and the Perfect Recipe (9 page)

“Did boys and girls dance together?” Emma asked. She sounded a
little worried.

“Sometimes,” Mia replied.

We were quiet for a minute. I think all of us except for Mia were feeling
nervous about the dance.

“Did you see the part about the fund-raiser?” I asked.
“It’s going to be in the parking lot of the school. If you have an idea to
make money for the school, you can set up a booth. The booth that makes the most money
will get a prize.”

“I heard the basketball team is doing a dunking booth with all of
the gym teachers,” Alexis reported. “I bet that will make a lot of
money.”

“Maybe we could have a dunking booth for math
teachers,” I joked.

Over at the PGC table, Sydney was talking in a loud voice on purpose.

“Our club is going to have the best booth at the fund-raiser,”
Sydney bragged. “That’s why we have to keep it top secret.”

Alexis rolled her eyes. “This is supposed to be for the whole
school, not just the Popular Girls Club,” she said. “Only Sydney can turn a
good cause into something about herself.”

“I wonder what their top secret idea is?” Emma asked.

Alexis had that look on her face where you know the wheels of her brain
are spinning faster than a car’s.

“You know, I bet we can raise a lot of money just by selling
cupcakes,” she said. “Who could say no to a cupcake for a good
cause?”

“That’s not a bad idea,” Mia agreed. “But
we’d have to make a lot of cupcakes, wouldn’t we?”

Alexis took out her notebook and started scribbling numbers.

“There are about four hundred kids in the school,” she said.
“Let’s say half of them go to the dance. That’s two hundred. Then
there are teachers.
And parents, and younger brothers and sisters.
So let’s say that’s another two hundred people, for a total of four hundred.
Now let’s say that half of those people buy cupcakes—”

“We’d need two hundred cupcakes,” I said, and then
gasped. “Oh no! I did math. Mrs. Moore must be getting through to me.”

“That sounds like a lot of cupcakes,” Emma said.

“Not really,” Alexis said. “It’s about seventeen
dozen. We could bake a few dozen at a time over four or five days. Since it’s for
the school, I bet we can ask our parents to donate the ingredients. If we sell each
cupcake for fifty cents, we’d make a hundred dollars.”

“Fifty cents?” Mia asked. “At the cupcake shop in
Manhattan, they charge five dollars a cupcake. Katie’s cupcakes are just as good
as theirs.”

Alexis’s eyes were wide. “Who would pay five dollars for one
cupcake?”

“Maybe we could charge two dollars a cupcake,” Emma
suggested.

“That could work,” I chimed in. “If we sold all of the
cupcakes, we’d make four hundred dollars. We might even win the
contest.”

“We should definitely do this,” Mia said, her eyes shining
with excitement.

“I’m sure this is better than whatever
Sydney is planning,” Alexis said smugly.

I looked over at the PGC table. I wasn’t really thinking about
beating Sydney. I was thinking about Callie. She wasn’t too interested in the
Cupcake Club when I talked about it. But if we won the fund-raising contest . . .
maybe Callie would be convinced she was in the wrong club.

“I’m in,” I said. “So how exactly are we going to
make two hundred cupcakes?”

W
e should have a meeting so we can figure this out,” Alexis suggested. “We could do it at my house this time. How about Saturday?”

“I’m going to my dad’s this weekend,” Mia said.

“Next weekend should be fine,” Emma said. “It’s a month until the dance, anyway.”

“We need to figure out what kind of cupcake to make,” I reminded everyone.

“We can do that next week,” Alexis said. “We’ll work out a schedule, too.”

So the following Saturday I showed up at Alexis’s front door with a whole bunch of recipes and enough ingredients for a couple dozen. If we were going to decide on a cupcake, we would have to do some research.

Alexis lives in a brick house with a very neat front lawn. The bushes on either side of the white front steps are the kind that are trimmed into a perfect globe shape.

Alexis looked surprised when she answered the door.

“Hi, Katie,” she said. “What’s all that?”

“It’s for our meeting,” I explained. “So we can experiment with cupcake flavors.”

“Oh,” she said. “I thought we were just going to talk about it.”

“Why just talk when we can taste?” I asked.

Alexis led me into the kitchen. I’ve been in her house a few times so far, and I’m always amazed how clean it is in there. For example, there is nothing on the kitchen counter, not even a toaster. Our counter has a toaster, the big red mixer, a cookie jar shaped like an apple, Mom’s spice rack, and usually a bowl of fruit.

Alexis’s mom was at the kitchen table, setting up a pitcher of water and glasses for our meeting, along with a bowl of grapes. I noticed there was a piece of paper and pencil at each of the four places around the table.

Mrs. Becker was wearing a button-down light blue shirt and dark blue dress pants. I’ve never seen
her wear jeans, not even on a Saturday. Her hair is auburn like Alexis’s, but it’s cut short.

“Hello, Katie,” she said when she saw me. She noticed the bag I was carrying. “Did you bring snacks? How nice.”

“It’s actually supplies, so we can make test cupcakes,” I told her.

“You mean you’ll be baking?” she asked. “Oh dear. I didn’t know you’d be baking today, Alexis.”

“We’ll clean up when we’re done, Mom,” Alexis said. “Promise.”

“It’s true. We clean up all the time when we bake at my house,” I added.

Mrs. Becker gave a little sigh. “All right. But let me know when you are ready to turn on the oven!”

She hurried out of the kitchen.

“Mom doesn’t like it when the plan changes,” Alexis explained. “Especially when there’s a mess involved.”

“I promise we won’t make a mess,” I said. Then I remembered what my kitchen usually looks like when I bake cupcakes. “Well, not too much of a mess, anyway.”

Emma and Mia arrived next, at the same time. Alexis neatly piled up the pencils and paper, and
I took all of the ingredients I’d brought out of my bag. Besides the basic cupcake-making stuff, I had mini marshmallows, chocolate chips, nuts, sprinkles, red-hot candies, tubes of icing and food coloring, and a jar of cherries—just about everything I could grab from the pantry.

“Mmm, everything looks so yummy,” Mia said.

“Well, I was thinking that we have to make a really
incredible
cupcake if we’re going to sell a lot,” I said. “Something we’ve never done before.”

“How do we do that?” Emma asked.

“We experiment,” I said. “Mom and I do it all the time. That’s how we came up with our famous banana split cupcake. Only I didn’t have any bananas, so we’ll have to come up with something else.”

I turned to Alexis. “Do you have a mixer?” I asked.

“Not the kind you have,” she replied. “It’s the one you hold in your hand.”

“That’s fine,” I said. “First we need to make a regular vanilla batter.”

I had made so many vanilla cupcakes over the last few weeks that I didn’t need a recipe at all. Pretty soon we had a perfect bowl of batter ready.

“Now we just have to figure out what to add in,” I said.

“Everyone loves chocolate chips,” Mia suggested.

We stirred some in.

“Marshmallows go well with chocolate,” said Alexis.

Emma nodded. “Definitely.”

We added some mini marshmallows to the batter.

“What about nuts?” Emma asked. “It might be good to have something crunchy in there.”

“Some people are allergic to nuts,” Alexis pointed out.

“That’s true,” I said. “But sprinkles are crunchy too. Maybe we could put sprinkles in.”

Alexis wrinkled her nose. “You mean put them
in
a cupcake instead of on top?”

“Why not?” I asked.

Nobody had a good argument. I dumped in half a bottle of rainbow sprinkles.

“They look good,” Mia said. “And I don’t think there’s room in the bowl for anything else.”

We scooped all of the batter into the cupcake tins Alexis put out for us. Because of all the stuff we mixed in, there was a lot of batter left over.

“I don’t have any more pans,” Alexis said.

“No problem,” I told her. “We can always bake more when the first batch cools.”

Mrs. Becker came in to preheat the oven for us.
She raised her eyebrow when she saw our cupcakes.

“My, those look interesting,” she said.

“Wait till you taste it, Mom,” Alexis told her. “You’re going to love it!”

While the cupcakes baked, we whipped up some plain vanilla icing.

“Should we add anything into the icing?” I asked.

“I think the cupcakes have enough inside them,” Mia said.

“Good point,” I said.

We cleaned up our mess while we waited for the cupcakes to bake. When the timer rang, Mrs. Becker helped us with the oven.

“Do you take them out now?” she asked.

“We need to test them first,” I said.

Mom had taught me how to stick a toothpick into the middle of a cupcake. If it came out clean, it was done. But if it had batter on it, the cupcake needed to cook more.

I stuck a toothpick into the middle of one of our mixed-up cupcakes. When I took it out, it wasn’t clean. But it didn’t have batter on it. It had gooey marshmallow, chocolate, and a sprinkle stuck to it.

I frowned. “I’m not sure if it’s done or not,” I said.

Alexis looked over my shoulder. “They look
done. They’re a little brown on top, see?”

I realized there would be no sure way to tell if the cupcakes were done. We might as well take them out. Besides, I was dying to try one! The delicious smell of baking cupcakes was taking over my brain.

We put the cupcakes on a rack to cool. Normally, we talk a lot when we’re waiting for cupcakes to cool off. But that day we stared at our cupcakes, like we were going to cool them off with the amazing power of our minds alone.

Finally Mia blurted out, “Maybe we should try them without icing. You know, to get a true sense of how they taste.”

“That sounds very logical to me,” I said.

We each picked up a cupcake. They were warm, but cool enough to handle. I unwrapped the paper and took a bite. A hot, gooey mess of chocolate and marshmallow exploded in my mouth.

“Mmmmmm,” was all I could say.

Alexis had a weird look on her face. “It’s too sweet!”

“There’s no such thing as too sweet,” I told her, and Emma nodded in agreement.

Mia had another complaint. “They’re kind of messy,” she said, wiping her hand on a napkin.

“Let’s see what my mom thinks,” Alexis said.

She left the kitchen and returned with both parents. Mr. Becker was tall and skinny with curly hair and glasses like his wife.

“I think you girls have a great fund-raising idea,” he said. “Everybody loves cupcakes!”

Alexis handed one to each parent. “They’re not iced yet,” she said. “They might taste different when they’re iced.”

We held our breath as Mr. and Mrs. Becker bit into their cupcakes. Mrs. Becker made the same weird face that Alexis had.

“My, they’re very sweet!” she said.

“They’re tasty,” said Mr. Becker. “But I’ll tell you something. I’m not a big fan of marshmallows. Never liked them. You know what makes me happy? A plain vanilla cupcake. Mmm.”

I thought of Callie’s dad. “I think that’s a parent thing. Parents like vanilla cupcakes.”

“And don’t forget, parents are a big part of our sales,” Alexis reminded us.

I was starting to feel discouraged. “But plain vanilla cupcakes are boring! We need our cupcakes to be extra special so everyone wants them.”

“Well, maybe they could
look
special,” Mia said.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Well, this is a school fund-raiser, right? Maybe
they could be in the school colors or something,” she said.

I immediately knew what she was talking about. “Mrs. Becker, can we have another bowl, please?”

I scooped half of the vanilla frosting we had made into the new bowl. Then I put a few drops of blue food coloring into one bowl, and a few drops of yellow into the other. Emma helped me stir them up.

“Make that one bluer,” Mia said, pointing.

After a couple of more drops, we had the perfect blue and yellow—the official colors of Park Street Middle School.

“Mia, do your magic,” I told her.

Mia expertly iced one cupcake with blue frosting and another cupcake with yellow frosting. Then she used an icing tube to write “PS” in yellow on the blue cupcake, and “PS” in blue on the yellow cupcake.

“Just imagine there are plain vanilla cupcakes inside,” Mia said, holding them out to us.

“They’re just right!” said Mrs. Becker.

“I bet you’ll sell a hundred of those,” agreed Mr. Becker.

“
Two
hundred,” Alexis cheered.

“We will,” I said confidently. “We are definitely
going to win this contest. We just have to do one thing.”