Christmas Cupcakes

I had a very hard time deciding what cupcake to make for Christmas; peppermint, gingerbread, eggnog? In the end I went with peppermint because I don't like the other flavors. One of my personal quirks is that I hate most typical holiday flavors. These cupcakes were very simply, peppermint cupcakes with pieces of peppermint on top and then butter cream icing.

My sister and I made the cupcake on Christmas Eve. I love baking with my sister. We have been baking together at a very young age and mostly unsupervised :) Our way of cooking together is one of us will read the recipe out loud and the other one gets the ingredient or performs the cooking task. It is a great thing. Brain helped us by crushing the peppermint pieces. It turns out to be a tricky thing. You could not smash them to hard or peppermint shattered into dust. Brian had to hit them with just enough force for them to break a part but not disintegrate.

We made the butter cream frosting on Christmas after Christmas dinner while the rest of the family was hanging out. Butter cream is difficult to make. It involved a double boiler and lots of mixing. The ingredients are sugar, egg whites and two sticks of butter. We mixed it all together and it tasted very grainy like you could taste the individual butter molecules in the icing.
We then beat it to death and it turned very think and yellow. We filled it into a piping bag and I attempted to frost my first cupcake. The icing was so think that I had to work really hard to get it out. The cupcake looked beautiful and I displayed them on my cupcake holder. They were a big hit.