by Coco Simon
Matt laughed. “That’s true,” he said.
My mom would have been proud.
CHAPTER 12
Cupcake Panda-monium
Panda cupcakes aren’t as easy to make as they look.
For one thing, M&M’s for ears are heavy, and they don’t want to stay put when you wedge them into the outer edge of soft frosting, which is where they show them in the pictures online.
For another thing, it takes a skilled hand and lots of time and patience to make little brown-featured faces over and over again.
We learned this the hard way, at Katie’s house on Friday.
The four of us Cupcakers had gone to Katie’s straight from school, and we’d planned to decorate the cupcakes, then head to our respective homes to shower, change, and primp (except Mia, who’d brought her stuff, so she could get ready at Katie’s). Then we agreed we’d regroup at Katie’s to bring the cupcakes to the skating party together.
Only with the cupcakes taking so long, we ran out of time to go home. And to shower. And to change.
Did I mention that making panda cupcakes is also messy work?
Here’s what happened: We frosted the chocolate cupcakes in white frosting, then we let that set for a little while. We were thinking we’d just whip through the faces, so . . . maybe we watched Ballroom Dancing for a little too long. But we were also tired, it had been a long week—the usual. So we had about an hour left to do the decorating, then an hour to go home and change.
Mia and Katie started on the decorating, with me and Emma kind of watching, since they’re the two who are good at “pretty.” (Though I am a wiz at fondant flowers; it’s my specialty.)
Mia cut the end off a tube of brown gel frosting and put the M&M’s in a bowl. Then she looked at the photo I’d printed from the Internet and began to do the first face.
“Wow, this is kind of . . . hard,” she admitted. “You have to stop after each feature and get the frosting to stop coming out before you can move on to the next. See? Each cupcake is going to take a long time.”
“What?” I asked, peering over her shoulder. I knew they had this covered, so I wasn’t that engaged.
“Watch.” Mia piped a blob for one eye, then she reached for a knife on the table and nicked the drip of frosting, so it wouldn’t drag across the bear’s white face. Then she did a blob for the next eye, then she had to do the same thing with the knife again to stop the frosting. Then she piped a nose. (“It’s impossible to make this a triangle. Sorry, Lex,” she said with a shrug. “I can’t imagine how they got it to look like that in the photo.”) Then she nicked the drip and then piped the mouth with a line connecting it to the nose.
“Wow. Slow,” she said, blowing upward with her mouth to get a stray strand of hair off her face.
“Who’s doing the ears?” she asked.
Katie offered, and she took the cupcake and stuck the ears into the top edge of the cupcake frosting, right above the eyes.
Emma tipped her head and looked. “Cute. Ish. It will get better as you do more, Katie, I’m sure. That’s just the first one.”
And then—plink, plink! The M&M’s fell out of the frosting and onto the table.
“Wait, why’s that happening?” I asked.
“The frosting’s not stiff enough, darn it!” said Katie. She reached for two new M&M’s (the previous ones were covered in white frosting and wouldn’t work). “What if we put them in a little deeper, like this?” she asked, wedging the M&M’s more on top of the frosting, kind of above the panda’s eyes.
“Well, they’re supposed to be coming off the top of its head. That’s what makes it look like a panda,” I said. “How long will it take for the frosting to stiffen?” I asked.
“Longer than we have,” Mia said with a grimace as she looked at the clock.
Emma was biting her lip. “Also, I hate to say it, but if we have the ears coming off the head and we try to put them in the cupcake carriers, they might not fit. They’ll just get knocked off as we put each cake into its slot.”
I put my head in my hands and moaned. “Is this just a total fail? Now we have three-day-old cupcakes that look bad, too.”
“They’ll be fine. Kids don’t care, anyway,” Katie said, bustling over to help Mia. “But I think it’s all hands on deck now. Just put the ears where they’ll stay.” She handed us each a tube of brown frosting, and the kitchen fell silent as we all got to work. Soon we each had a knife in one hand as we got better at wielding the gel tubes. The M&M’s ears looked funny, but it was too late to do anything else.
“These don’t really scream panda,” Emma said at one point.
“Panda!” I screamed, and everyone laughed.
“Well, it was a good idea,” Katie said kindly. “Thanks, Alexis. Very creative.”
“Don’t worry, my feelings aren’t hurt. It’s fine,” I said. “I just wish we had done a test batch first, the way we usually do. But these looked like they’d be easy from the photos! Oh well. Live and learn.”
I’d set a pretty high bar at the movies yesterday, appearance wise, and I knew I’d have to look great again tonight. Dylan had laid out another outfit for me and had promised to help with hair and makeup. (I’d taken perfect care of her sweater, leaving it neatly folded, with tissue, on her bed, and a five-dollar iTunes gift card I’d gotten for my birthday, sitting on top as a thank-you gift, so she was waaaay into me right now.)
At some point, Mrs. Brown came home from work, and she began helping, too. Because she’s a dentist, she has a steady hand, so she can pipe frosting like a pro. I kept looking at the clock as we went into our final hour, and with not a lot of time left until we had to leave, and with flecks of white frosting, as well as blobs of brown, all over my blue T-shirt and jeans, I started to panic.
“I . . . Would you guys mind if I called home to see if someone could bring my outfit over here?” I asked. There goes Dylan’s professional hair and makeup; now Matt will probably think I look awful, I thought sadly.
“Great idea!” agreed Emma.
I dialed home and was lucky enough to get my mom on the phone, and she agreed to bring the outfit on my bed, plus swing by Emma’s to pick up her outfit. So Emma called her mom to tell her what to put out, and then we went back to the decorating. It was just. So. Slow.
My mom arrived about fifteen minutes later and stayed to chat with Mrs. Brown. After a few minutes, she realized we were totally in the weeds, so she sat down and got to work too.
And then disaster struck.
With about two dozen cupcakes left to go, we ran out of brown frosting!
We had to leave for the party in fifteen minutes.
My mom and Mrs. Brown told us to run upstairs and change, and they’d figure it out. So we raced up to Katie’s room and put on our outfits. There was no time for showers, so we took turns washing our faces in the bathroom and brushing out hair. Katie generously offered us makeup and perfume and anything we wanted, but I’m not so good at putting that stuff on, and I was so stressed about the cupcakes, I just wanted to get dressed and get downstairs.
I threw on the cute outfit, which wasn’t too dressy (certainly not like yesterday’s)—dark-washed jeans; a pink long-sleeved T-shirt; a raspberry-colored, fitted fleece vest; and a batik scarf in pinks that I’d wound around my neck a few times, like Dylan showed me. To finish it off, my new pink ski hat. Dylan had also lent me these elaborate lace-up brown leather boots that were really complicated to put on and take off. Since I wouldn’t be skating, I hadn’t minded when she’d shown me how long it would take to put them on. But now that we were running so late, I didn’t have time to fuss with them. I jammed my feet back into my plain brown clogs and clomped back downstairs to see if the moms had come up with a solution. And they had!
Mrs. Brown was at the stove, stirring something in a pot. I sniffed the air.
“Yum! Chocolate sauce?” I asked.
“I had an idea!” said my mom. She looked down into the pot. “That looks about righ
t. And we don’t want it too hot.”
Mrs. Brown poured the sauce into a little bowl and handed my mom a tiny clean paintbrush.
“I’m going to practice first,” said my mom. “It’s been a while!”
“What are you doing?” I asked, intrigued.
My mom took a thickly folded paper towel, dipped the paintbrush into the chocolate sauce, and then painted a quick series of graceful interconnected lines on the paper towel.
“Pretty!” said Mrs. Brown.
My mom stood back and assessed it. “Huh. Looks pretty good! Now I’ll try it on a cupcake.”
“It looks like Chinese writing,” I said, coming around the table to look more closely.
“It is,” my mom said quietly. “It’s the Chinese character for ‘love.’ The word is ai.”
“Cool!” cried Mia, who had arrived back in the kitchen. Katie and Emma arrived too, and we explained it to them.
“That’s perfect!” said Emma. “Because it was Valentine’s Day, and now it’s Chinese New Year, and so it’s love and Chinese and . . . How do you know how to do that, Mrs. Becker?”
Duh! I hadn’t thought to ask that myself. “Yeah, Mom. How do you know how to do that?”
My mom’s cheeks turned a little pink, and she laughed. “Oh, well. I learned it a long time ago.”
“Did you study Chinese?” asked Emma.
My mom glanced nervously at me, then she sighed. “The truth is, I had a huge crush in college on a boy who was Chinese. I wanted to make him a card, like a love note, so I learned how to write the character for love in Chinese calligraphy from a friend of mine.”
“That’s so romantic!” Mia sighed.
“Did it work?” asked Katie.
My mom shook her head. “Sadly, no. My crush was one-sided.”
“I’m sorry, Mom. That’s sad,” I said.
“Well, everything turned out for the best, and I met your dad after all, and he was just right for me! I just wish I hadn’t wasted so much time and energy on that boy.” She dipped her brush in the sauce and painted a perfect Chinese symbol on a cupcake. It looked great.
“Well, I, for one, am glad you did, or we wouldn’t be able to salvage the rest of these cupcakes!” Mia laughed.
“Yeah!” we all agreed.
But I was watching my mom closely, and she turned and gave me a small smile and a wink. I nodded. I now knew why she was so concerned about me and the time I was spending thinking about Matt. She wanted to protect me, maybe from heartbreak. Besides wanting me to be independent and everything, of course.
I went over and hugged her before she dipped her brush again. “Thanks, Mom,” I whispered. “I ai you.”
“Wo ai ni,” she said. “That’s how you say it in Chinese.”
“Wo ai ni, then.”
We made it to the skating party only ten minutes late, and who was the first person I ran into but Sasha! After we settled the cupcakes on the buffet and the PTA president paid me, I introduced Sasha to all the Cupcakers, and we chatted for a while before she left for the night.
“Wait until you see Alexis skate tonight!” Sasha said proudly. “She is my star student! Such a fast learner!”
“Oh, well . . . I’m not so sure I will skate tonight,” I said, shrugging. “You know. I’m not ready for prime-time viewing!”
“Don’t be silly! You must practice to be good! Now is opportunity, and you can show your friends too!”
I felt bad. Sasha had worked hard with me and was pleased with what she’d accomplished, and I was kind of blowing it off.
“Well, maybe I’ll just rent the skates, and then we’ll see . . . ,” I said.
“Get skates, come back, and I tie them properly for you. Go now. I wait,” she ordered.
“Okay, okay,” I agreed. I went to stand on the rental line, which was unfortunately very short. I got my skates too fast and was back in a jiffy.
“Sit, sit,” said Sasha. My friends sat too, to put their skates on, and then we were all ready. “Come!” commanded Sasha. She led the way down the ramp. She was even tinier without her skates on.
“Is Matt here already?” I whispered to Emma, frantically scanning the crowd on the ice for any sign of him.
“I’m not sure. I think he had practice, so he was coming late.”
“Phew.” I gave a huge sigh of relief. “So maybe I can get this over with before he gets here.”
“You mean you can warm up, so you’re ready when he arrives!” said Sasha, who’d been eavesdropping.
“Busted!” cried Mia, and we all laughed. We’d reached the door to the ice. Ugh.
“Now go, my little prodigy. Skate and have fun!” Sasha said with a smile.
“Hi, Sasha!” cried someone. Ugh. Olivia Allen, of course—right as I’m about to get on the ice.
I froze. I didn’t want to do this.
“You did a great job teaching Alexis to skate the other night,” continued Olivia. “It took me months to learn what she did in one night. It was impressive.” Olivia pushed by us and went out on the ice. I glanced at Sasha, and I could tell she was pleased. I was glad Olivia had been nice to Sasha and hoped it had something to do with what I’d said.
“Well,” said Sasha, embarrassed.
“Thanks, Sasha!” I said. Then I walked onto the ice and fell down.
Just kidding!
I stepped gracefully over the threshold, and holding onto the side, I began to skate.
“Push, then glide!” called Sasha from behind me. I knew if I turned, I would fall, so I just waved and kept skating.
Suddenly, someone whooshed up next to me. I hoped it wasn’t Olivia! I turned just the tiniest amount.
Matt.
“Hi!” he said with a grin.
I grinned back. “I heard you were at practice,” I said.
“Canceled because of the party,” he said. “They knew no one would come.” He shrugged. “Want to skate?”
“Oh. I’m sure you’re much better than I am, so why don’t you just go ahead, and I’ll catch—Whoa!” Matt had grabbed my hands like Sasha had and begun skating, strong but not too fast, around the rink. He took me on a loop, and as I passed the entrance, I saw Sasha grinning widely and waving. I wasn’t about to let go of his hands, so I just grinned back like an idiot.
The best thing about being a bad skater is having someone hold your hands when they skate with you. Especially someone cute, who you are totally crushing on.
“It’s so embarrassing being a bad skater,” I said.
“Well, no one has to be to be great at everything. And you’re great at so many other things,” said Matt. “Feeling embarrassed is really a waste of time.”
Then Matt leaned in next to me. “By the way, you looked really pretty with your hair and everything yesterday, but I just wanted you to know you look pretty just all normal like this. Prettier.”
I laughed and blushed. “Thanks. I guess I’m just a normal kind of girl.”
“Alexis Becker, you are way, way above normal,” said Matt. “And don’t you ever let anyone tell you otherwise.”
And we skated around and around. Ah, Mom would love him, too. Wo ai ni—I thought (but would never say!)—Wo ai ni.
Want another sweet cupcake?
Here’s a sneak peek of the next book in the
series:
Katie
sprinkled
secrets
Good Secrets, Bad Secrets
Sometimes I can’t believe how much I’ve changed since I’ve started middle school. On the first day of school, my best friend, Callie Wilson, dumped me because she didn’t think I was as popular as her new friends. But now I have three best friends: Mia Velaz-Cruz, Alexis Becker, and Emma Taylor, and they are really great.
I used to think boys were just, well, boys. But now I have a sort-of boyfriend named George Martinez.
I used to think it would be really bad if my mom ever got a boyfriend. But now she’s dating Jeff—who I have to call Mr. Green sometimes
, because he’s a teacher at my school—and it’s not bad at all.
I used to bake in my spare time. But now I bake almost all the time, because my friends and I have a real business selling cupcakes—the Cupcake Club.
I also used to be really against the idea of joining a competitive sports team at school. I would just get too nervous about the whole thing, and then I would make all these goofy mistakes. But now, well, things are different.
“Katie, I don’t get it,” Emma said during lunch in the cafeteria one day. “Why did you join the track team? I mean, it’s great, but I thought you just liked to run for fun.”
“Well, I was really anxious about it,” I admitted. “But Jeff—I mean, Mr. Green—is friends with Coach Goodman, the track coach. And the track team is the one team you don’t try out for—anyone can join. So even if I don’t run in any races, it might be fun to run with a group of people.”
“And Coach Goodman is so nice!” Mia added. “I have her for Technology. She makes everything seem so easy.”
I nodded. “Yeah, she’s supernice. She took me aside in the hall and said she heard I was a good runner. She said I could come to a practice and check it out. She doesn’t put a lot of pressure on the team, but everybody tries really hard, anyway, you know? So it seemed good, and I just thought I should go for it.”
“That’s really great,” said Alexis. Her curly red hair bounced on her shoulders as she nodded. “You know, any activities you do will look great on your college application. It’s never too early to start.” We all rolled our eyes but laughed because Alexis is always thinking about things like that.
“I think you’ll be great,” Emma added, smiling. “You’re an awesome runner!”
“Thanks,” I said. “I don’t know how I’ll do in a real race, though. Coach Goodman says I should do the long-distance races, the 800-meter or the 1,600-meter. And maybe a relay.”
“E-mail me your practice and meet schedule when you get it,” Alexis said. “It’s getting harder and harder to schedule our Cupcake Club meetings these days.”
