Cranberry cupcakes for Christmas

Fresh cranberries! I don't think I ever saw them for sale in Australia, or maybe I just wasn't looking. Anyway, Costco carries them around Christmas time (all the way from Wisconsin to Japan) and they're quite a festive looking berry :)

I wanted to bake something for a Christmas party and was a bit short on time, so I tried to find a fairly simple/easy/quick recipe to utilize my bag of cranberries. This is what I found: Quick Cranberry Cake by onecaketwocake... but I opted to make mini cakes rather than a large one.

As usual I did all the mixing by hand, which is a little slower and a littler harder, but it still works out fine.

The berries are so pretty it almost seems unkind to bake them. Almost. There was also a very high berry to batter ratio and I was a bit worried they wouldn't hold together, but they cooked just fine.

The cake is light and sweet which balances the tartness of the berries really nicely. I hope you had a fantastic Christmas, regardless of whether it involved cranberries!

Quaker Oatmeal Raisin Cookies

Wow, I got into quite a non-blogging rut there. I may have even forgotten I had a blog.

I still bake sometimes, but I find I get sugar headaches quite easily, particularly if I just taste icing on its own (like, even just a tiny bit to check it's not horrible before I put it on a cake), so I have to be a bit careful.

I made some oatmeal raisin cookies recently for a charity bake sale, and I think the oats do a good job of balancing the sugar content.

You can find the --->recipe here<<--- and I found the serving size was actually spot on - a neat 4 dozen smallish cookies!

And since they were for sale they were all bagged and labelled. (Sorry, planet.) Oh, also I soaked the raisins in boiling water for about 10-15 minutes before adding, because I read somewhere that that makes them plumper and reduces the chance they'll burn.