Christmas Cupcakes

Merry Christmas Eve everyone!  As this Christmas season comes to a close, it brings a time when all the presents are wrapped and the bows are tied and we can simply relax with our family and enjoy the holiday!

If anyone else has a baking tradition in their family, here's a festive dessert to try!  During the winter, my vice has always been candy canes, I eat them throughout the day and put them in hot chocolate at night!  Cupcakes are such a classic dessert, but I love them because there are endless ways to decorate them, and I really wanted to incorporate them into my cupcakes, so I added red food coloring to the white cake batter to give the inside a marbled candy cane effect, and I hand-crushed miniature candy canes into various sizes to use as sprinkles on top!

They turned out so pretty and were perfect for the holiday week with family and friends!  I hope you're having a relaxing day and are with the people you love the most!  Merry Christmas!

Surroundings

          Happiness is an emotion not a destination.  We may not be happy all the time, but if we decide that we can be happy in this moment, then we can let ourselves cherish the day.  So I've been surrounding myself with things that make me happy.  I exchanged my matching orange pillowcases with one that my grandmother embroidered and one that I had on my very first big girl bed when I was two.  They comfort me when a moment of tribulation arrives and offer a sense of hope that when I wake up the sun will have risen on a better day.
          And when there are days that I feel the least motivated or in need of something productive to do, I give myself a challenge, or a project, something that will give me an accomplishment.  Something that will make me happy in that moment. Something that will save me from a moment of doubt.  Cupcakes save me.  Especially vanilla cupcakes with homemade butterscotch frosting and green sprinkles!

Finished Cupcakes!