Travel Agent Cupcakes and The Husband's Ex Girlfriend Tour

After my husband and I were dating for awhile it was time to take that all important step and meet his family. We were living together in Munich at the time. I also had a second flat in Cologne for work where we would sometimes spend weekends. Dr. B grew up about an hour outside of Cologne. One one of our weekends there, we got in the car and headed out to meet his mother have coffee and then to his sister's home where I would meet her, her husband and their five children.

As if this wasn't enough for one day, we then headed to Aachen, Dr. B's old medical school stomping ground and proceeded to have more coffee dates with two of his ex girlfriends. I admit, aside from feeling a bit like I was on display..

 Hi everyone! Meet my new girlfriend of the rare Americanus species.


I found this whole being such good friends with your ex thing strange. This was definitely my problem and no one else's. They were all lovely and gave me a warm welcome. Over the years, I've met and socialized with them all. I also think it says a lot about them (and Dr. B) that they maintain good friendships to this day.

One of his ex's, Uschi owns a travel agency.

Over the years, Uschi has gone the extra mile to book many lovely vacations for us and is in charge of getting Dr. B home to me every 5 weeks (the commercial flying part once he's out of Iraq).

It was her birthday recently, we were invited to her place for a birthday dinner. Uschi is one of the most amazing cooks ever and always puts out an impressive spread.  She also makes Thai food like nobody's business and would definitely rock a food blog. Unfortunately, she has no time or interest for blogging. For her birthday dinner,  I made her these birthday travel agent cupcakes thinking these would give her a laugh.  She loved them.

I made my go to vanilla cupcake recipe which is from the fabulous Hello Cupcake book.

The buttercream topping was a mish mash of leftover buttercreams I had in my fridge in various flavors including apple and cherry to which I added blue food coloring. Here is a good recipe for vanilla buttercream.

The cupcake toppers were all made out of homemade marshmallow fondant I colored, cut and molded into the different shapes - globe, airplane, sunglasses wearing sun, suitcase, palm tree, boarding pass, passport (I made the German version) and mask, fins and snorkel.

It was helpful to google clip art and images for each topper to get an idea of shapes and colors.

Gute Reise!