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Cupcakes – who doesn’t like ‘em
We tried out this cup cake recipe from allrecipes.com for our little ones birthday and it turned out real good. We were debating between a store bought birthday cake Vs baking cupcakes and clearly cupcake was a winner – cost wise it worked out as well

For cup cake:
Ingredients: makes about 15 regular sized cup cakes
2 medium sized eggs or 1 extra large egg
1 cup sugar
1/3 cup brown sugar
½ oil – we tried with canola oil
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 cups shredded carrot
½ cup drained/crushed pineapple
1½ all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
½ teaspoon ground nutmeg
a pinch of ground ginger

• Preheat oven to 350 F
• Line muffin pan with muffin liners.
• In a large bowl, beat together the eggs, white sugar, and brown sugar and mix in the oil and vanilla.
• Fold in carrots and pineapple.
• In a separate bowl, mix the flour, baking soda, salt, cinnamon, nutmeg, and ginger.
• Mix flour mixture into the liquid mixture until evenly moist.
• Transfer to the prepared muffin cups.
• Bake 25 minutes in the preheated oven, or until a toothpick inserted in the center of a muffin comes out clean.
• Cool completely on wire racks before topping with the icing.

For butter icing: tops about 40 cup cakes
From wilton’ website
½ cup softened butter
8 oz softened cream cheese
4 cups confectioners sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
wilton’ icing colors

• In a large bowl, combine butter, cream cheese, confectioners’ sugar and 1 teaspoon vanilla.
• Use a hand mixer and beat until the mixture is smooth and creamy.
• For mixing color in icing dip a toothpick into the color, then swirl it into the icing.
• Blend the icing well with a spatula.
• More information on coloring the icing can be found here.