I LOVE Martha Stewart! I’m a huge fan of her recipes, her show, her entertaining ideas and that she made it cool to be a crafty homemaker again. Anyone who knows me well will confirm my admiration of her. A year ago I was with a client and happened to be in the building were Martha’s design studio is located and her show is filmed. The elevator in the building is a big freight elevator and often everyone is crammed in. While I was talking to my client I heard a recognizable voice. I asked my client if Martha Stewart was in front of me and sure enough it was she. We were going to have to squeeze past her to get out of the elevator and I was thinking about what I would say. As I pushed by I blurted, “I love you Martha, you never fail me.” As we walked away and the elevator doors close I heard laughter from her and her producers. My client was also laughing in disbelief.

High on life, the minute I was away from my client I called my best friend Sally Atkinson to tell her of my experience. She laughed and then said, “she never fails you…don’t you remember the witches?” Sure enough, I started laughing as Sally and I remembered a night seven years ago when we attempted to make these adorable witch cupcakes that were part of a MS Kids issue which highlighted a cupcake design for every month of the year. The night already started off on a bad foot, as I couldn’t find any of the particulars of the recipe to make our cupcake adventure look exactly like their cupcakes. I LOVE Manhattan, but sometimes it takes a lot of work to find certain items – such as chocolate cones, chocolate pull apart twizzlers, and black cupcake papers. It became worse when the frosting tasted HORRIBLE. Not sure what had happened, since we followed the recipe exactly, we called our friend Tara Bench who was behind the creation of the cupcake feature. After looking over it she called us back to tell us that sure enough it had been printed wrong.

Well, I decided to make cookie witch hats for my Halloween TEST NEST so I invited Sally over to help – we had to redeem the witches. The first batch that we did worked perfectly and then the next three batches were not so easy. We couldn’t get them off the trays fast enough and the middles were still too soft. We battled through making barely enough hats by the time the batter was gone, and were thankful for Mark’s patience. So, while this idea did turn out, I’m not sure that we’ve redeemed the witches.