Boxcakes, part 1

My sister lovingly spends her time trying to get me to post her pictures on my blog. She's a dear.

She sent a boxed cupcake mix she got from World Market from Cobblestone Kitchen. The three-pack of cupcakes promises 12 cupcakes each of lemon poppyseed, strawberry and chocolate caramel, each with frosting! It's almost too good to be true.

In interest of my ever-growing love of poppyseeds and my desire to find them somewhere locally, I decided to make the lemon poppyseed for work today. My coworkers loved them, but I had some problems.

1) 3/4 cup of what basically amounts to powdered sugar is not enough to frost twelve cupcakes.
2) There was not enough lemon. On a business trip a few days ago, I had the MOST LEMONY muffins ever and they ruined me for the week.
3) When the frosting did come together after I added an additional cup of sugar to the 4 tbsp shortening, the resulting picture did not look like this:



It instead looked slightly like spackle.



They were still pretty tasty, though. Just not homemade. Coworkers described the frosting as 'crunchy' and very sweet. I've yet to figure out why these need frosting in the first place, but the strawberry and chocolate should do better in that arena.

Oh, I almost forgot to tell you! Mr. O and I were at the grocer the other day and he found these darling wrappers! How could I resist?




I need to get out more, huh?