Celebrate Mardi Gras!

In honor of Mardi Gras, and Fat Tuesday, here is a quick card we made. I think it captures the essence of the celebration quite nicely. The cupcakes featured on this week’s Cupcake Saturday were our Mardi Gras ones. Like our cupcakes, we use the traditional colors- purple (justice), gold (power), and green (faith) - in the card. We included some beads and a mask, as well. Here is a picture of the card:

When we were making our cupcakes, we were doing some research on the holiday. It is a lot more than just beads and booze. Here are some facts that surprised us:
* Mardi Gras literally means “Fat Tuesday” in French
* It is called “Fat Tuesday” because it’s the last day before Lent and giving up unhealthy foods. (Go big or go home, I guess. Now it's time to figure out what we should give up...)
* The three colors were chosen in 1872
* In the United Kingdom, it is known as “Pancake Tuesday”. They have pancake-eating contests!
* The baby in a King Cake represents Jesus and is supposed to bring good luck to the one who found it. They’re also responsible for bring the cake next year.
* The beads that are thrown were meant to represent royalty, a tradition that started in the 1900’s.

Cupcake Saturday!

Happy Weekend all! I hope you are having a great weekend like we are. Luckily the snow stayed away (they were predicting a lot, at least by this year's standards) and we were able to get our meet out of the way this morning. So tonight we needed to make some cupcakes for Cupcake Saturday! Well, hopefully we aren't disappointing. With Mardi Gras going on down in Louisiana, we thought this would be a great weekend to make some Mardi Gras cupcakes. We did some research on different kinds and couldn't quite decide which ones to make. We made some King Cake cupcakes (the pictures will be posted later) and some Mardi Gras colored ones. We topped these off with an Irish Cream buttercream frosting.

Ready to be piped into muffin cups, right out of the oven, and cooled and decorated.

(Talk about some kitchen counters in desperate need of remodeling and updating!)