Synchronicity

Last night I volunteered to make cupcakes for Jake’s class on Halloween. The room parent, Mrs. K, for his class sent out an email requesting help and I immediately replied. It’ll be great fun; I’ll make my basic cake with chocolate frosting and decorate each with a little jack-o-lantern made out of frosting on top. The orange pumpkin will look great on top of the chocolate icing and orange is my son’s favorite color. I was really looking forward to this little project.

Then I got a reply to my offer.

Mrs. K. enthusiastically accepted my offer, but... one of the students does not observe Halloween so she requested that I stay away from anything Halloween because “we want everyone to be included in the treat.”

Fair enough, we don’t do the whole Santa and Easter bunny thing so I can work my way around the Halloween thing.

So then I got to thinking, always a dangerous thing, and hit upon the idea of autumn leaves instead of jack-o-lanterns. I could do plain pumpkins, but that could be pushing it. The leaves are a much more straight on seasonal thing and don’t carry any Halloween baggage.

Now leaves take a little more finesse than pumpkins so decided to do a bit of searching on the internets for “leaf shaped candy.” I found a bunch of leaf shaped candy dishes and a few sites for maple sugar candy.

Mmm, maple sugar candy. I love that stuff. It’s soft, rich in flavor and melts in your mouth. This could be a very good idea.

I found one place, Jed’s Maple Products, that had something new to me, maple blend hard candy (scroll down). It looked very pretty and would probably work out. So I gave them a call. Steve answered the phone and he was a very helpful person. I asked about the size of the candies and it turns out they would be just perfect to stick on top of a cupcake. He was a little concerned about the kids, but I assured him it would be all right. Then we got down to brass tacks and I ordered two boxes and a maple cinnamon shaker (my kids love the stuff and I’m always on the look out for it).

When I told Steve where to ship the stuff he blurted out that he knew the county I live in. It turns out he lived in a neighboring county and went to VCU. We chatted some more and I mentioned that I knew the area he is in and that my Mom lives in Norwich, VT. Ironically he was just there yesterday at King Arthur’s Flour.

It really is a small world. I know where they are and they know where I am even though we are just over 700 miles apart and have never met each other.