Betsy St. Amant | Let Them Eat Cake

As an author, people often ask me where the ideas for my stories come from. The answer is – I have no idea. Sometimes I plot an entire novel around a setting.

Sometimes I plot the book around an internal struggle within my heroine.

Sometimes I plot my story around a theme or a spiritual message, and apparently, sometimes—I plot the whole thing around a cupcake!

One of my favorite pastimes with my five-year-old daughter is watching Cupcake Wars on the Food Network channel. We’ll snuggle up in the chair with a can of Pickle Pringles and a few Capri Suns, pick our team, and then talk smack to each other in a healthy competition throughout the show. At the end, we’ll cheer or commiserate for each other if our team won (or lost). It’s uncanny how my daughter has a knack for picking the winners from the beginning.

So when I needed to start plotting my next story, and someone suggested I write about cupcakes because I love them so much, I started thinking…what if there was a woman who loved baking, but couldn’t bake what she wanted? What if there was a heroine who had all these great, fun, adventurous recipes like the contestants on Cupcake Wars, yet, for some reason, couldn’t share them with the world? From there, I easily created two characters, best friends Kat and Lucas, who find themselves struggling with their careers and most of all, struggling with their not-so-just-friends feelings for each other and what their future will look like—both together and apart. What do you do when your dream doesn’t mesh with the dream of your true love?

ALL'S FAIR IN LOVE AND CUPCAKES is about romance and cupcakes and competition, yes, but it’s also about so much more—about sacrificing our dreams because of love for another, about pushing past the fears and insecurities that hold us back from those dreams, and about discovering the true meaning of happily ever after—and acknowledging that sometimes, our personal happily ever after looks nothing like we once thought.

Sometimes, it can be even better.

Lucas and Kat have to realize some hard lessons, just like we do in our own Life Story. For me, I never expected my life to turn out the way it has. An unwanted divorce, a career change, and a new apartment definitely qualify as a few unexpected plot twists! But just like the characters in the stories we love, we often have to walk down difficult roads to get to the happily ever after on the other side.

Me, I’m taking Kat’s advice and bringing a few cupcakes along for the trip.

Maybe one for each hand ::wink::