Yesterday morning I got up extra early to make Annabelle’s birthday cake. I wanted it to be a stressfree experience — serene, happy, full of love — to avoid the pitfalls described in Aimee Bender’s new book “The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake,” which I wrote about last week and read last weekend. (The ending really creeped me out, that’s all I’ll say.)

The baking part went well. Last night, we arrived home to two cooled cakes — chocolate and square and made from scratch, just as the birthday girl ordered — and a batch of cupcakes. Annabelle had a vision (gee, I wonder where she gets it?) of decorating each cupcake to look like each of her party guests.

I had a vision of Annabelle getting to the third cupcake and burning out. I was right. Two and a half in, and she was done. If you look at the photo carefully, you’ll notice that the two in the lower left corner have real personality. The rest (mine) kinda suck. After a pathetic attempt to make Sophie’s bangs out of fondant, I didn’t even bother to make sure I had the right number of blue eyes and brown heads — I just cranked out an assortment. And I’m not proud of this, but I wasn’t particularly cheerful about it.

What can I say? I was exhausted from the early morning cake and a full day of work. To make matters worse, Sophie was at the other end of the table making an enormous mess with her own cupcake, icing and several hunks of fondant. And “Mary Poppins” was on in the background and I’m officially sick of that movie. Sorry, Julie.

So after all that, the cupcakes still might taste a little bitter, and they don’t look nearly as cute as they would have if Annabelle had decorated them, but there was no way to pace ourselves: You can’t devote two weeks to decorating cupcakes, if only because you’ll wind up with rocks at the end.

At least the party’s not at the house.