State fair sushi cupcakes

Here I go with another post. I still have not learned to spell check, so I will have to be careful. I am in the writing mood so just have to get started.
I practice baking for the fair all year long. Before I practice I dream up things I want to do. Years ago we could have our plates returned after our entries were judged, but they do not do that any more. I love presentation and during the year I would find cute dishes in thrift stores to put my food on.
One year I was inspired by Clare Crespo's book, The Life of Food. It is full of creative fun food. I decided to make the sushi cupcakes. I searched to find cute little black plates about 3 inches across and a bamboo tray to put them on. At our fair if you do individual things you have to do 8 of them. Since the cakes were an oriental theme I decided to buy matcha a powdered tea used for tea ceromonies. I had to look all over this town to find some. Clare's recipe calls for fruit roll ups to wrap around the cupcakes. I bought one to try out before baking day. I did not want really big cakes so I bought 10 cans of tomato paste, emptied them froze the paste for later, and baked my cakes in them.
It was late at night, as usual when I was baking. I took the cooled cakes and started to roll out the fruit roll ups like I had done before. They would not roll. I evedently had bought another brand, and they were too thick. I decided to coat the cakes with dark green frosting instead of the fruit roll ups. I was not into fondant then or I might have tried that.

I finished all 8 cakes, I had made 10 and practiced with one before deciding on the 8 I was going to present. I took one of the cakes into the living room in order to be able to see it in a brighter light.
To my horror the dark green cake was dark navy blue. I must have put the wrong lid on the paste food coloring the last time I had used it, and used blue instead of green. I was out of powdered sugar to make more frosting. It was about 3 AM and no stores were open. Frantically I remembered from grade school that if you added yellow to blue it will make green. It worked.
The next morning I loaded up all my entries, about 8 of them that day and was on my way to the fair. I started smelling this really powerful scent of the matrcha. The further I drove it seemed stronger and stronger. I thought I could not enter that. It did not smell good to me. It was surly not the sweet scent of vanila, or the perky smell of lemon.

I entered them in anyway, really nervous about the judging. I did not want to sit in my chair when they came before the judge. I wanted to move away as far as I could from the stage, AS I explained before, the judges are up on a stage and you are in the audience.

I saw the assistant put the tray beforre the judge. I could not watch. There was a lady with big, big hair right in front of me. I scrunched down so all I could see was the judge picking up the fork and get a bite of the cupcake, tht terrible pungent matcha tea cupcake. I waited for the fork to go down, and to be able to see from behind the big, big hair the judge pick up the micophone and tell me my fate. I could see him pick up the fork again, I sneeked a peek from around the curly processed blonde head. He was not frowning. He was almost smiling, and he took a third bite. Well, I can realize a judge taking a second small bite to make sure he tasted what he thought he did in order to chose the right negative words to describe the item, but 3 bites do not add up to negative. I straightened up, put on my poker face and faced the judge with a different attitude. He picked up the microphone then, and with a smile,said, "What I have here is a beautiful inovative sushi cupcake. It gets a 98, a blue ribbon! "

Thanks to Clare and her book, another great day at the fair.