Cupcake vs. Muffin

At the beginning of each year, friends of ours choose a food that their whole family agrees they will all abstain from for the entire year. This is admirable, as long as it is not us doing it. If it were us, we would no doubt choose things like cabbage or rutabaga. We are real sacrificers, as you can tell.

But this is not what our friends do. They choose foods like cake. Soda. Candy. Chips. Fast food. Foods that are vital to one's well-being.

A whole year.

The trouble begins with defining the particular food. This year, for example, the shunned food is cake. So chocolate cake is out, of course. But what about brownies? Brownies are different, they decided. They're not cake, so they're allowed. But most box mixes give options for fudgy brownies and cake-like brownies. So is a cake-like brownie a cake? Little harder, but...still not cake, they decided.

Which brings us to muffins.

I took several desserts to a function at the house of these friends recently, among them cupcakes. Totally forgetting about their cake ban, I told the Hero that he was not to make any  moves on the cupcakes before we went to our friends' house, as I wanted to make sure there were enough for everyone. The morning of, I remembered the Cake Vow. There were too many cupcakes for us to keep at home—though the Hero strenuously objected to this reasoning—and so off we went with our taboo dessert, along with others that were allowed.

"You're gonna have plenty of cupcakes," I told him. He was delighted saddened to hear that the family would not be able to partake.

At our friends' house the rest of us all endeavored to find a loophole that would allow the family to eat the cupcakes without violating their decision. A lively discussion ensued as to whether the cupcakes were actually cupcakes, or whether we could assign them to a more healthy, non-banned category of food, such as muffins.

"It's got butternut squash in it," someone pointed out.

Clearly, the involvement of a vegetable meant it was not cupcake-ish.

Perhaps the frosting was a clear demarcation between muffin and cupcake. "Scrape off the frosting and it'll be a muffin," I suggested.

This seemed to give the mother pause, but after considering the example she was setting for her four kids if she crossed into a cupcake gray area, she contented herself with cookies and brownies.

I admired this. Not enough to institute such a ban myself, but enough to keep all the cupcakes at home next time. So as not to tempt anyone, of course.

A lack of mystery

The Princess is mourning the end of her mystery writing class, during which she was immersed in the intricacies of creating sympathetic yet dynamic characters, bumping off characters without leaving behind too much to clean up, and pondering exactly what "sympathetic yet dynamic character" means. During this time, she often asked the Hero deep questions about life, such as "Do dogs eat graham crackers?"

This question was extremely relevant to the story she was working on, because the character she found most challenging to write about was not the main character -- a hair stylist by day and food blogger by other times -- nor her friend, a priest, nor even the bad guy. No, the most challenging character was: a dog. The food blogger's terrier, named Massachusetts. This difficulty of taking a dog's perspective arose because the sum total of the Princess's knowledge about dogs is 1) they eat, 2) they sleep, 3) they bark, and 4) they are among the most pitiable of creatures, because they cannot eat chocolate.

Unfortunately the Hero's canine knowledge is about the same, and he had no wisdom to offer on the graham cracker question. You can see how this small store of knowledge would limit what the Princess could write about Massachusetts. His principle role in the story is mostly as a vacuum cleaner of sorts, inhaling anything with even a particle of food substance in it, and standing guard at the oven door when his owner, the food blogger, is testing one of her new creations. He is not, however, an entirely one-dimensional character: He also stars in a few napping scenes.

However, we should point out that the story currently has just two chapters and a prologue, so there is the potential for Massachusetts to climb to heights of greatness and extreme usefulness in the story, provided there is some tasty treat at the top of the climb.

For ten weeks the Princess parked on a couch to plan and execute devious plot scenes and write witty dialogue. She was loathe to interrupt her writing sessions and leave the couch, so she often prevailed upon the Hero to bring her beverages, snacks, and other life-sustaining substances such as the Sunday comics. Though happy to oblige, at times the Hero feared that she would eventually fuse with the couch, and that would never do, because then how would he take naps?

The Hero provided invaluable feedback as an objective reader of the Princess's writing, particularly because he could offer an all-important male perspective ("You should put in more puke scenes"). Not all of his advice was followed ("Why doesn't the good guy beat up the bad guy?"), but it was appreciated nevertheless.

Now that the class, and its deadlines, are over, the Princess is suffering ennui, although the Hero is strongly urging her to finish her story (and to include something that blows up, like a car, or an oven). She may, she says. To keep it percolating in her mind, every now and then she has a random thought about her story line. Like, whether sympathetic yet dynamic characters ever experience ennui.