Happy(?) New Year
This can be a very depressing time of year. Another year has passed and maybe your life is not where you want it to be or where you thought it would be by now. You’ve attempted things in the last 365 days, gotten your hopes up and you’ve failed.
If you then make the mistake of looking at social media, you’ll see the photos of smiling couples, new cars, fabulous trips proclamations of undying love and devotion. But what if, like the facades of a town or an apartment on a movie set, they’re just that – fake? Not all of them, of course, but some.
The fake looks so beautiful from the outside. You begin to feel worse about the lack of some of these things in your own life and wonder why they’ve eluded you for all this time.
It’s like those supermarket cupcakes. You know the ones I mean. They look really pretty with colorful icing piled high and swirled just so. You are fooled and so you buy them. You get them home, pull off the paper and dive in for a big bite only to find that they’re actually disgusting. The quality is very low. The icing tastes like lard and food coloring and there’s a grittiness to them. The sugar literally hurts your teeth. What a disappointment.
When I owned my gourmet shop at the height of cupcake mania, I regularly offered at least three different unusually flavored cupcakes for sale each day. Always wanting to up my game, I signed up for a class locally in the evenings to hone my decorating skills. The instructor insisted we only use the frosting recipe she provided because the texture would allow it to hold the shapes of swirls and flower petals, etc. The problem was, the taste was downright awful! It was inedible really. When I pressed her on this, her response was that it was just for looks and people just scraped it off and ate the cake. I never went back.
I guess I want it all and is that so bad? I want it to look good and taste even better. Maybe my designs weren’t quite as elaborate, but they were certainly delicious and isn’t that what matters? Someone’s life or relationship can look pretty damn enviable from the outside looking in, but if it’s actually crappy, what’s the point?
I wish for you all (and for myself) a maybe not dazzling looking but damn good tasting cupcake kind of 2019. The kind that when you take a bite, your eyes close, you can’t help but smile and you think, “OMG that’s freakin’ phenomenal!” – in other words, the REAL thing; no fake crap allowed.
