I’m pretty sure that one of my official duties as ‘mom’ is to bake cupcakes. Preferably in a rainbow of colours and decorated with cool -yet painstakingly difficult and time-consuming – decorations. Like marzipan pumpkins with hand-shaped stems and leafs to match.

I think cutting sandwiches in the shapes of stormtroopers and making cute faces on personal pizzas is up there on the list somewhere too.

Martha Stewart, are you kidding me?

The thing is, I don’t really bake. I cook, yes. I really love to cook. But baking? Well…it’s not really my thing. I guess it’s just too precise for me. You can’t really play with ingredients or measure by ‘eye’. Then there’s all that flour all over the floor. The spoons that have to be licked. And the 10K that has to be run just to work off one slice.

It just doesn’t seem worth it.

Well, it didn’t seem worth it. Until now. I decided to honour my maternal obligations and get to bakin’ (I specifically registered for cupcake tins knowing this fate was inescapable) and much to my own surprise, my pumpkin and pecan cupcakes with cream cheese icing turned out great! (Alright Martha, I’ll give you this one. The recipe was pretty straightforward.)

As for those marzipan pumpkins…well, I did have every intention of tinting the almond paste with food colouring, shaping it into little balls, scoring them with a toothpick, rolling out little stems, cutting out tiny leaves, and all.

Then I found these little pre-made sugar pumpkins at the bulk barn and well, never looked back.