absurdly peculiar

My friend is turning a quarter century this Saturday but will be going up North to celebrate. So I decided to make her cupcakes for her birthday. I decided to make mini and regular sized cupcakes. I used red velvet cake mix (beacause really, it's just easier that way). The frosting was a mixture of 1 box of cream cheese, a couple dashes of cinnamon, vanilla, honey, lemon zest, a 1/2 cup of confectioner's sugar and I folded in a cup of cool whip to make it into a lighter tasting cream cheese frosting. I also made some candied walnuts by warming them up on the stove for a little and mixed in some honey, cinnamon and white sugar. I'm not even sure if that's how you actually make candied walnuts..but they are walnuts and they are sweet, thus the term candied walnuts emerged from my head. Hopefully, she likes them. They need to be dropped off today because I already ate 4!

I made Red Velvet Cupcakes out of the box this weekend. But I attempted to make them pretty looking. For the frosting, I used 1 stick of 1/3 Reduced Fat Cream Cheese, Cinnamon, vanilla, 1/2 stick of unsalted butter, 1/2 C of powdered sugar and a little lemon. For the topping, I used toasted cinnamon, honey, sugar pecans (that I made myself!), dark chocolate shavings from Trader Joes, and strawberries. They turned out pretty good and I was impressed with the way it tasted and looked. I liked that the frosting was not too sweet or heavy... and I think next time I will just go with the pecan topping instead of chocolate shavings because the pecans were super yummy. Hopefully, I will be able to experiment with more baked goods as I wait for my working visa.