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!

Brown Sugar Cookies

Any recipe that contains brown sugar and cinnamon immediately grabs my attention.

Also, I'd been on a bit of a "cupcakes and nothing but cupcakes" roll, so I thought some simple cookies were probably in order.

As I reported to a friend, these brown sugar cookies that I found at Joy the Baker's blog (<<< link here) are kind of a lighter, lazier version of snickerdoodles, with the sugar and cinnamon (plus a little ginger) on the inside.

I didn't read the recipe very well and accidentally put in baking powder instead of soda... so then I added a little baking soda as well for good measure (about a teaspoon on top of the original two of powder). This no doubt contributed to their lightness. Next time I'll try the suggested amount and see whether it makes much difference.

Although I expected darker, moister cookies, these were cute and very more-ish. In the future I'd probably make them bigger so people (aka. me) don't feel the need to eat a few at time!