Currently, I am slightly obsessed with gourmet cupcakes from our local HyVee grocery store. I love them so much I tend to give them as gifts. They’re clutter-free, and you never have to worry about them being the right size or the right color. And who doesn’t love a pretty cupcake?

Recently, it was my friend Michelle’s birthday.  I wanted to do something nice for her, so a cupcake would be perfect, right? Right.

I picked up one large, beautiful cupcake in its pretty box and off I went to the office to deliver it, only to find she’d taken the day off and gone out of town for the day. (Good for her!)

The next logical step would have been delivering it to her husband to take home to her. I drove by his office, and he wasn’t in either.  Shoot.

“Well, I’ll just take it to her when I go to the office in the morning,” I thought.

Sounds easy enough, right?

The next morning, I was up plenty early, and I really don’t know what happened. I had plenty of time. And then suddenly I didn’t have plenty of time, and I was running late.  I scrambled to finish getting ready and get out the door to go to the office.

I swung through McDonald’s for breakfast, only to discover they were closed. Seriously? Closed? CLOSED. (There was a skid loader jack-hammering concrete in the parking lot, which I’m guessing was the reason for the closure.)

I looked at the clock. I had precisely 8 minutes to get to our meeting, not nearly long enough to get to the other McDonald’s on the north end of town (which would have been open, by the way.) SIGH.

I don’t know about you, but when I am hungry and geared up for a certain something, a substitute, no matter how good, is still a poor substitute. So I had to go somewhere else.

Finally, I blaze into the parking lot, juggle my purse, a bag, some magazines, my water, breakfast…and the cupcake, which I had sat up on the car sitting next to mine.

I reached out for the box which held the cupcake. In a slow-motion blur, the box opened as I brought it towards me, and the cupcake came tumbling out, falling, falling, falling…coming to rest upside down on my foot. :-/

I was stunned speechless, although I must have made a sound. My friend Debby, who was our guest speaker, walked around the front of my car.

“Carmen, do you need some help?” she asked.  There I stood there with the open cupcake box. I looked at her blankly, unable to speak. She looked down at my foot.

She bent down and picked up the offending cupcake from my shoe, helped me put it back in the box,  and went on inside for her meeting.

In a fog of disbelief, I set the now-destroyed cupcake inside my car, grabbed a paper towel and wiped the worst of the frosting off my shoe.

This is where it landed. :-/

I’m not sure which was more disappointing: not having the gift I envisioned for Michelle, or the total waste of a perfectly good cupcake!

It was only once I got back in the office my wits came back and I remembered to thank Debby. And as I told the story of the cupcake, someone noticed I had frosting on my other leg. 😀

At home later that day, I threw the cupcake box away.

I must confess: I had serious thoughts of eating that cupcake. I actually went back to the trash, plucked out the box, and stared longingly at the now misshapen cupcake.

I pondered. It was my foot, after all.

And then I saw the telltale specks of dirt; apparently it had touched the parking lot too. Dang.

Oh well. They’ll make more. 😀