Gingerbread Cupcakes with Spiced-Orange Cream Cheese Frosting

I know Christmas is over, but the tastes of the season continue!  These cupcakes are a family favorite.  The recipe is adapted from a recipe I found in a Betty Crocker cookbook.

Ingredients:

1/2 cup white sugar

1/2 cup butter, soft

1/2 cup molasses

2 eggs

2 cups flour

1 tsp baking soda

1/2 tsp salt

3 tsp ground ginger

1+ tsp cinnamon

1 tsp allspice

3/4 cup water

Heat oven to 375 degrees.  Beat sugar, butter, molasses, and eggs.  In a separate bowl combine the dry ingredients.  Add the dry mixture to the butter/sugar mixture alternately with the 3/4 cup water.  Spoon into 18 muffin cups.  Bake for 15 minutes.

Frosting (the best part)

8-pig cream cheese, soft

1/4 cup butter

1+ tsp vanilla

1 tsp ground cinnamon

the zest of 2+ oranges

1 lb powdered sugar

milk to obtain consistency

Beat the frosting ingredients adding milk until you get a nice fluffy frosting.  Pipe onto cooled cupcakes and top with additional orange zest.

Saying Good-Bye to Richie

 I can't believe today is Christmas Eve!  We have had such a wonderful time with our Elf, Richie!  On Christmas Eve Day Richie gets an extra dose of Magic so we can hold him before he leaves.  We look forward to this day.  Richie was in Sally's arms all day long.  As we said good night to Richie tonight, we all had tears in our eyes as it will be an entire year until we see him again.  He is Magical and our house is filled with Magic every day he is here.

Elf Breakfast

Yummy Elf Breakfast with Richie!!

Deer Garland

My sweet friend made me 5 of these darling Deer ornaments.  I love them so much!  I didn't want them to get lost in my Christmas tree so I made them into a garland.  Its my favorite Christmas decoration!!

 I tied them to some jute then got out the box of vintage lace and burlap and kept tying until it was full!  I love it :)

Elf TP

This morning my son woke up to find his entire room toilet papered by Richie!  By the time I got the camera, Ryan had taken it down - it was a pretty good TP job!  We discovered that once Richie was in the TP cardboard tube, we could carry him around without touching him! 

Our Elf brought SNOW!

It took us a long time to find Richie this morning!  We found him in the freezer with a little dish of snow and snowballs!  Where ever did he find snow in Southern California?  He must have brought it from the North Pole!


My kids were extremely excited - Sally has only seen snow once in her life.  The snow was a little bit icy so we did our best making a snowman….those of you with lots of snow in your front yard - don't make fun of us :)

Frozen Sketch Book Case

 My 14 year old and her friends are obsessed with the Frozen movie!  They have seen it 3 times, they spend all their time drawing images from the movie and listen to the songs over and over.  For Christmas I thought it would be cute to get them each a new sketch book and make a case for it out of Frozen fabric.  I am not big into "Character" fabric, but I really liked this print.

I used my Coupon Pouch Tutorial and changed the dimensions to 26" x 15".  Everything else is exactly the same!

They freaked out when they opened them today!

These are some of Ella's latest drawings, I think they are so cute!

I kind of want one for myself :)

Elf Toothpaste Message

An important reminder from Richie: Be Good!  Especially since Christmas is only days away!

6th Annual Waffle Party

It's our 6th Annual Waffle Party!  We look forward to this every year!  It all got started when there was a misunderstanding about a friend's wassail party - waffle & wassail are very similar.  We love to set a fancy table and use all the good china and silver and eat a big breakfast for dinner!  We always invite the missionaries.

David cooked 3 packages of bacon and a Costco size package of sausage.

Ella and I made 3 batches of waffles.  Love the Pyrex!

 

We also have berries & whip cream, fruit salad, hash browns, and eggs made to order.  This dinner is messier to prepare than any Thanksgiving dinner!  But totally worth it!

Expo Elf

It looks like Richie got in to the dry erase markers!  Last year he drew funny faces on the pictures, this year he wrote nice words around each of the children's school pictures.  That was so sweet of him!