Our Annual Night Before School Starts Dinner

My boys start school tomorrow.  I will have a freshman and a junior in high school.  (My daughter doesn't start 6th grade until Wednesday.)  It is tradition in our family to have a special meal the night before school starts to celebrate the new school year.  So, tonight for supper I was going to make a heart shaped pizza and tie-dyed frosted cupcakes.  What I ended up making was a heart shaped pizza and chocolate cupcakes with buttercream frosting and yellow sprinkles.  Here's what happened with my attempt at tie-dying frosting.

I just used a regular chocolate cake mix to make the cupcakes.  They turned out great.

Mixing up the buttercream frosting went smoothly too.  I mixed together 1 cup of softened butter,

3 cups of powdered sugar,

1 teaspoon vanilla,

and 3 Tablespoons milk.

I used a hand mixer to blend the ingredients together into a smooth textured frosting.

Here's where the trouble started.......  I was out of frosting bags so I thought it would be OK to use a regular zip lock bag.  To get the tie-dyed affect, I used my finger and smeared lines of food coloring paste on the inside of the bag.

So far, so good.  Next I added the frosting to the bag and squeezed it to the bottom corner where I had placed the frosting tip.

No problem until I started to squeeze the frosting out of the tip.  My bag burst open and I had tie-dyed frosting all over.

So, I cleaned up my mess and decided to frost the cupcakes with the remaining buttercream frosting then used yellow sprinkles as the final touch.

The kids could have cared less.....they were just glad to have a sweet treat!

The pizza turned out much better.  I mixed up pizza dough in my bread machine - I just used the recipe that came with the machine.  I rolled out the dough and then shaped it into a heart.

I spread on our favorite topping and even cut little hearts out of the pepperoni.

I put it in the oven and about 30 minutes later, dinner was ready.

My boys act as if it's no big deal to have our annual Night Before School Starts Dinner but I can guarantee that they'd be very disappointed if I ever decided to skip a year!

"Education is learning what you didn't even know you didn't know."  -Daniel J. Boorstin