A Haunting Question & A Challege Accepted

I have been contemplating a serious subject. It has plagued me deep into the night, kept me awake in the long hours of the early morning. I have pondered; I have searched for answers.
The question, it haunts me:
""Can there ever be too much chocolate?"
Please tell me someone has the answer. I need my beauty sleep after all. Who knows what kind of hideous creature I would become without it...*shudder*
Let's get back to the subject of chocolate, shall we? Or rather the lack of it.
Chocolate is the favorite flavor of cupcake in my house. It always wins. Hands down. Now, while I enjoy people loving my baked goods...sometimes I tend to view people's personal tastes as a challenge. In other words, I consider it my duty and responsibility to create a non-chocolate cupcake that is adored as much as the famous chocolate cupcake is. (Or even, dare we think it, even more adored? See why I'm up at night? It's radical thinking, my friends.)
Now. Here is attempt #1.

Ginger Honey Pear Cupcakes
Doesn't that sound nice? It sounds classy, a complex and promising mingle of delicate flavors. A light ginger cake filled with sweet caramelized pears topped with a lofty frosting hinting at the taste of honey. A guaranteed bulls-eye in the world of culinary joy.

*sigh* It wasn't. It was sticky. The tops were flat. The cake flavor was too strong, filling too bland and soft. The frosting wasn't lofty, but runny and adding more powdered sugar would have hurt your teeth it would be so sweet. Case in point: It wasn't as good as chocolate. Not even close.
But here's the thing, at the beginning of 2013 when I decided to make one cupcake recipe a week I knew there were going to be days like this. Recipes that didn't really work, failure cupcakes so to speak. And I told myself no matter what, I would blog about those days, I wouldn't get frustrated with myself, I would give up the next week, and most importantly...I would try to learn from it.
And I did! I learned about moisture content in cakes, working with fresh spices, all sorts of things.

And so -- here's to the first Cupcake Failure of the Year! Funnily enough...I'm even more excited to try non-chocolate recipes in the coming months. But maybe I'll stick with a nice cocoa based cupcake next, if only so I can get a good night's sleep for once. ;)