it's a swamp monster! no, wait, it's... cupcakes?

Everyone knows that the surest way to a boy's heart is through his stomach. (No one ever says through his chest, oddly enough. Hahaha, see what I did there? Yes, I do laugh at my own jokes.) So what do you do when a cute boy is coming over for supper? You bake cupcakes. (At least  I do.) Not that, unfortunately, cute boys come over for supper all that often... or ever. Which makes this all the more important.

Now, my mother is a little bit of a health food nut. That means it is extraordinarily difficult to find such ordinary substances as sugar in the house at any given time. (Agave syrup, however, we have plenty of. Go figure.) It took me about fifteen minutes of rooting around in the cupboard before I finally found some brown sugar.

Now, the recipe called for white. In my infinite wisdom, I thought- oh, what difference will it make? They're both sugars, right? So I used the brown sugar. (It was either that or the aforementioned agave, which is thick and sticky, a little like watered-down honey. I tried making cupcakes with it once, but they turned into something more akin to a mud puddle instead.) This made a light brown batter. However, the cupcakes I'd decided to make were lime-coconut, so I decided to colour them green.

Not my best move.

The combination of brown sugar and green food colouring turned the cupcakes an unappetising (read: disgusting) swampy colour. I added more and more colouring in an effort to make them prettier but it just made them swampier. (Think Shrek.) In an instant, my hopes of impressing the aforementioned cute boy went down the drain where that colour belongs. (FYI, this isn't a date. He's the son of one of my parents' friends. So, not only will he be grossed out by the cupcakes, I can't just avoid him for the rest of my life.)

All this was before I'd even added the coconut. Hoping that it would somewhat dilute the swampiness, I put in a cupful... and recoiled in horror. They'd turned lumpy.

What's worse than swampy cupcakes? Cupcakes that are both swampy and lumpy. Yum, right? Even making some mini ones (and really, what's cuter than mini cupcakes?) couldn't negate the atrocity.

Here are a couple of photos, just so you know I'm not exaggerating (for once!): 

 The implements of destruction...

Before cooking...

And after...

Oh well, here's hoping that he's completely colour-blind.

Has this ever happened to anyone else? Does anyone have any suggestions on how to pull this off gracefully? (I'm planning on wearing my blue mascara and hoping he'll be so distracted by the beauty of my eyes that he won't even notice. Although if he really is colour-blind, he won't notice... hmm, dilemma.)