Messy Kitchens, Unfinished Business, and Hope for a Better Tomorrow

My boyfriend and I are moving to a new apartment TOMORROW! This is very exciting for a number of reasons. Please allow me to list a few:

1. It will be just the two of us. No room mates, no couch guys, no pets (except Batman the angelfish). Just us.
2. The apartment is beautiful. Cute and clean and pretty and bright. More than enough space for us.
3. I will finally (after a year) have a kitchen that I WANT to cook in!

This is what I've been working with so far

And the rest of the kitchen is worse. No clean counter space, floors that have given up pleading to be mopped. Just really a disaster. 

I do not deny that part of this is my fault. However, no one has incentive to clean if no one else cleans. Why should I bust my butt to clean a kitchen when it's just going to be nasty when I come back? 

I know that the new kitchen will be different because Mike and I have very similar habits and goals for kitchen cleanliness. It may not always be spotless, but it will never be this gross. 

Now, onto the main point of this post: 

Given that I have had this disaster area to work in, one might wonder How do you make delicious, innovative cupcakes in a kitchen I'm afraid of? 

Well, I made a box mix of chocolate cake and portioned it out into this cool pan, all the while making as little contact with the kitchen surfaces as possible.

After they baked, I let them cool, dumped them out, and put them onto a plate

The tv tray made a wonderful kitchen counter substitute. I cut off the rounded tops of the cakes so they would be square and then iced two or three stacked on top of each other.

I ended up with these charming beauties. I had planned to decorate them, but they got gone before I got the chance! Ah well.