It’s definitely time for cupcakes. After all, spring has sprung. What better time to get our pastel frosting action on?

Well, I think spring has sprung. The D.C. area has a habit of swinging back and forth like a crazed toddler on a playground with temps, but I’m hoping we’ll stabilize soon. Until we do, I plan to hide in the house with cupcakes.

These are, according to a picky person I work with, the best thing I’ve ever baked. The cupcake batter is made with Canada Dry® Blackberry Ginger Ale and topped with a blackberry frosting. They’re pretty darn special.

All year long, I wait for fruit to finally become available. It seems patently unfair to me that some parts of the world have amazing fruit on a yearlong basis while we have to endure the winter.

But then I think about my grandmother. When she was a girl in Russia, they barely had any fresh fruit, ever. One day someone gave her an apple, which was a rare treat. Her siblings (she had five of them) ate their apples right away, but she saved hers for later. And saved it. And saved it.

You can probably guess what happened. The apple rotted, and my poor grandmother never got her treat. When I think about that story and then consider how absolutely spoiled I am (I mean, I can’t go a day without sugar), I realize I have nothing to complain about.

There’s no doubt that the spring brings forth increased desire for refreshing treats, and these cupcakes are the epitome of that. The Canada Dry® Blackberry Ginger Ale is made with real ginger, and I also have some ground ginger in the cupcake batter. The goal is to create a subtle undertone of ginger to complement the stronger blackberry flavor, and it worked out great.

As the official birthday coordinator in my office, it’s my job to bring in treats for everyone’s special day. When these cupcakes came into the office, nobody could resist eating them. There’s just something so festive about a blackberry ginger cupcake in the spring!

I also brought in some of the Canada Dry® Blackberry Ginger Ale 2-liters so that everyone could taste the soda, and all that bubbly made everyone even happier. But since the soda is only available seasonally through mid-May, they’ll have to get it quickly!

These can be made with pretty much the ingredients you already have, plus the Canada Dry® Blackberry Ginger Ale. For the frosting, make sure the jam you buy is seedless. You don’t want seedy frosting!

Remember to pick up a bottle of Canada Dry® Blackberry Ginger Ale for some fun spring cupcake action this season. Your cupcakes will be the life of the party, guaranteed!

After Halloween, there’s a ton of spilled candy corn everywhere. In pantries, cabinets, behind the fridge…yep. I wind up finding candy corn wedged into small spaces way after it’s out of season. How to deal with this?

Use it, fast! And the best way to transition from one holiday to the next is to use candy corn in these adorable chocolate ganache cupcakes. With an Oreo turkey on top, nobody can resist! Look at their little faces.

I’m trying to mentally prepare myself for pie-baking craziness and my mind is going a million miles an hour because I have endless ideas about what to bake this year. There are so many different options for pie out there, but our Thanksgiving table can only accommodate about five pies before things start to look really excessive.

In general, Thanksgiving is an easy holiday. It’s basically a menu with some preset factors (turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, pumpkin pie) and room for lots of additions and creativity. I love to cook while watching the Macy’s parade on TV. If you get up at a decent hour and cook through the morning, that’s pretty much all the time you need for the main dishes and sides.

If you think I’m in the wrong here, that’s okay. I’m just saying that effort-wise, I find Thanksgiving to be on the lower maintenance end, though not quite so much as July 4th. And you can make dessert ahead of time, which is even more of a bonus. I have two pies already in the freezer and November just started. We’re making good time here!

Plus, once the meal starts, it’s nice just to sit back and have a glass of wine and enjoy. Or if you’re me, to take that glass of wine to the kitchen and pick at the turkey carcass. Sorry. I’m a scavenger, and it’s one of my favorite things to do on Thanksgiving.

In honor of what is definitely one of my favorite holidays, I also get crafty with the food. These cupcakes are a cute and easy addition to any Thanksgiving dessert spread. When my own kids saw these, their eyes lit up and they all wanted one right now. My daughter always tends to want things (insert demanding tone here) right now.

These are a fairly simple chocolate cupcake (but you can use a mix if you like to save time) with a quick ganache topping. The most time-consuming part of this is making the little turkeys. Those candy corn feathers really want to fall out of the top. I found myself working hard to make sure each one wound up with four feathers. If I were less anal-retentive, I would have let my kids make these with me. Mine are a little young, but older kids can definitely help out here.

Once these are atop your cupcakes, it’s open season on Thanksgiving celebrations. The best part of the holiday is coming together over food that people prepare with lots of love. Why not start the celebration a little early this year?

Um…everything. Anything. Whatever you want. Therein lies the glory and the danger. But the best treats in the world are a little bit dangerous.

I’m not sure if the cupcake craze is over yet (it’s definitely calmed down), but I hope your own personal cupcake craze reignites when you see these chocolate cupcakes. They have a peanut butter cup surprise inside and a healthy dollop of peanut butter pumpkin spice frosting! And, of course, some more peanut butter cup for bling. If you’re gonna make a cupcake, make a dang cupcake.

I’m not sure if extreme thinking works all the time the way it does for cupcakes, but it’s good to try and keep your fears under control. Whenever I’m equally eager to give something a shot and terrified that it won’t work out, I know I have to just go for it, no matter what happens.

Two years ago, when I’d just started playing the guitar, my then-teacher made me do my first open mic night. Part of me really wanted to do it while the other part was just in the horrors. I could barely play. How was that going to work out?

I still remember how scary it was waiting for my turn to play and sing. Everyone was just so good, and they’d clearly done the open mic thing a zillion times. I was nowhere near that skill level, and I remember really hating my teacher for forcing me to humiliate myself in front of everyone.

But you know, while it wasn’t the best performance ever (I played a bunch of wrong notes and my voice was all wobbly), it wasn’t terrible. I learned that people are really nice and encouraging, and that they just want you to do well. If you can let go of the fear, then just trying something new is the success story. You don’t have to be amazing to avoid failure.

One of my colleagues has an expression she uses on our students. When they’re fearful about doing anything, she says, “You gotta shut up and participate.” In other words, quit whining and worrying and just do whatever is causing all the drama to build up inside your head. It’s great advice, and I try to live by it some of the time. It’s not always possible to conquer every fear.

But it’s totally possible to make pumpkin spice peanut butter into the #bestfrostingever. If you haven’t seen Jif’s line of whipped PB in the grocery store, go look for it. When you mix it into vanilla frosting, it makes a perfect, easy cupcake finisher. If you want to make your own vanilla frosting first, you can. But I went easy and bought some from my local bakery. Sometimes it just works to skip a step.

Hey, I’m not afraid to admit that I take shortcuts sometimes, and I’m also not afraid to tell you that it makes me feel a little guilty. But who has time for making frosting every day? It’s much better to spend that time doing something new that utterly terrifies you. I dare you!

DC is known for many tourist attractions, like monuments and museums. But a few years back, our humble city also became famous for…cupcakes.

Yep, Georgetown Cupcake, the famous pink-infused cupcake chain, hasn’t slowed down since the day it opened! I wasn’t even aware of its existence until a colleague’s son was on the camera crew for TLC’s DC Cupcakes, a reality show about the store. Suddenly, pink boxes began coming into the office because the camera crew got extras left over at the end of the day. Believe me, I was grateful!

Anyway, since that time, I’ve been to Georgetown Cupcake many times, and it’s a happy and cheerful place. Even better, the owners share their recipes with everyone! This one is a favorite of mine, their chocolate ganache.

If you’re a chocolate lover, this one is definitely for you. Sometimes cupcakes can get bogged down by an overly thick layer of buttercream. Depending on how you like your cake, that can be a good or a bad thing. But with these, the frosting is replaced by a thin layer of intensely chocolate ganache, all shiny and decadent. It’s so good! Here’s a before picture without the ganache. Pretty, but it needs that topping!

In the event you’ve ever been to Georgetown Cupcake, I believe their practice is to put a tiny fondant flower on these cupcakes. I did not do that. I’m not trying to copy their entire creative process here. I just want a good cupcake!

These don’t take much time, and they’re totally worth the end result. Plus, you can brag to your friends about being a baker worthy of famous cupcake prowess!

Next time you’re in the DC area, stop by one of their locations. Until then, enjoy one of these! Pink box with adorable flower sticker not included.

Cupcake:

• 1 and 1/4 cups flour
• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 cup unsalted butter, softened to room temperature
• 1 and 1/4 cup sugar
• 2 eggs at room temperature
• 1 cup milk at room temperature
• 1 and 1/4 teaspoons vanilla
• 1/2 cup unsweetened cocoa

Ganache:

• 1 cup semi-sweet chocolate, chopped
• 1/2 cup heavy cream

Instructions:

Preheat the oven to 350. Line 18 muffin cups with liners.

In a bowl, sift the flour, baking soda and salt. Set aside.

Cream the butter in the bowl of a stand mixer until light and fluffy. Add the sugar and mix thoroughly. One at a time, add the eggs, beating well after each addition.

Combine the vanilla and the milk. Gradually and alternately, add the milk mixture and the flour mixture to the mixing bowl, stirring gradually until all ingredients are combined. Scrape down the bowl and add the cocoa, mixing again until just combined.

Pour the batter into the muffin liners, filling 2/3 of the way up. Bake for 20 minutes. Cool slightly before icing.

When you’re ready to ice the cupcakes, place a medium-sized heat-proof bowl over a pot of water filled 1-2 inches on the stove top. Turn the burner to medium low heat and place the chocolate and heavy cream in the bowl. Stir until the chocolate and cream are melted together and glossy. Remove the bowl from the pot.

Wait 2 minutes and then frost each cupcake by dipping it in the warm ganache, twisting your wrist to get the excess ganache off the cupcake. Place onto a waxed paper surface to cool.

If you have leftover ganache, you can store it in the refrigerator covered for a few days and reheat and stir when ready to use it. I used it to cover strawberries!

Store cupcakes in an airtight container at room temperature.

One peanut butter cup is never enough. Have you noticed that? You eat one and then this force overtakes you and controls your mind, telling you that nothing will satisfy you until you eat another peanut butter cup. Or several.

Can you relate? Can you tell I’m an addict?

That’s why I decided that for these cupcakes, there need to be two peanut butter cups involved. One for you, and the other for…you. The peanut butter cake and peanut butter and chocolate buttercream are nice, too. You may feel like you’ve had almost enough by the time you’re through with these. But no guarantees out there in life, people.

So, a little bit of a backstory. I decided to turn my peanut butter cup cookie cupcake into something, well, more like a cupcake. And I was really going to leave it at that, just a simple little unfrosted cupcake with a peanut butter cup in the center.

But when they came out of the oven they actually looked sad. My brother was visiting (a.k.a. watching my children while I bake) and he agreed that there was something very pitiful about those naked cupcakes. So really, I had no choice. I had to add the frosting with the extra peanut butter cup. It’s like fate, really.

And when the icing was on, yay! Nobody looked sad anymore. Those cupcakes were puffed up and proud. And best of all, they tasted so intense! Peanut butter cake is the best. If you’ve never tried it, I highly recommend you add it to your bucket list. It’s a pretty easy swap. Just trade out some of the actual butter for peanut butter and you’re all set!

People who supposedly “don’t like dessert” (note: I hate those people) ate these. I think it’s hard to resist that little cute PB cup on top. Though maybe in another version I’ll add the bigger Reese’s. Hey, life is so short!

Which is why you should eat cupcakes. The supposed cupcake craze may finally be slowing down (what’s the new craze now? Fro yo? Salad?), but we need to keep churning out these cuties. This is America, folks. Cupcakes all around!

Cupcake Base:

• 1/3 stick unsalted butter, softened
• 1/3 cup peanut butter (I used Jif natural-style)
• 1 and 1/2 cups light brown sugar, firmly packed
• 1 and 3/4 cups flour
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 3 teaspoons baking powder
• 2 eggs
• 1 teaspoon vanilla
• 1 cup milk
• 12 miniature (not mini) Reese’s cups, unwrapped

Peanut Butter and Chocolate Buttercream:

• 1 cup unsalted butter, softened to room temperature
• 1/2 cup creamy peanut butter
• 1 cup unsweetened cocoa
• 5 cups powdered sugar
• 1/2 cup milk
• 2 teaspoons vanilla extract

Instructions:

Preheat the oven to 350. Line 24 muffin cups and very lightly coat with cooking spray.

In the bowl of stand mixer, beat the butter, peanut butter and brown sugar until light and fluffy. Add in all remaining cake ingredients except the peanut butter cups. Beat until ingredients have formed a thick batter.

Pour the batter into the muffin cups, filling them about halfway. Put a peanut butter cup in the center of each muffin cup and then cover it with a little more batter. Bake for 25-30 minutes until the cupcakes are golden. Allow to cool completely before frosting.

While the cupcakes are baking, make the frosting. Cream the butter and peanut butter until fluffy. Add the cocoa and beat until well combined. Alternating the powdered sugar and milk, add gradually, stirring after each addition, until both ingredients are fully combined. Add the vanilla and mix again.

Load the frosting into a piping bag fitted with a large round tip. Swirl the frosting onto  the cupcake and place another peanut butter cup in the center.

Store at room temperature in an airtight container.

Despite her smallness, my daughter can really eat. Every day when I get home from work, she looks at me and says, full of hope, “Want chocolate.” And you know what? I give it to her. Because I totally understand her, and because she’s cute. And because she’ll throw a mean tantrum if I don’t. That’s good parenting in action, people.

So for her birthday, I took one of my favorite chocolate cake recipes and made cupcakes out of it. Minnie Mouse cupcakes, to be exact. Because the only thing my daughter loves as much as chocolate is Minnie Mouse! And who can blame her?

While some may call this recipe a cheat because it uses a cake mix, it’s pretty well doctored. With the sour cream and pudding mix, it’s practically a scratch cake. And it sure tastes better than most fancy-schmancy chocolate cakes I’ve eaten in overpriced restaurants. It’s dense, moist, and oh so chocolatey. I wouldn’t want it any other way!

This cake base is my go-to for birthdays. It also makes amazing cake pops. But that’s another recipe for another day!

I wanted to make these super girly, so I went crazy with the sprinkles and edible spray paint. Nothing but the best for my baby! Mind you, I think she just wanted to sink her teeth into these. I’m not sure the decorations were really a factor. That didn’t stop me from buying and assembling this adorable cake stand.

There’s no better way to bring in a little one’s birthday, and any kid will make a beeline for these with her mouth hanging open. I used vanilla frosting, but you can always use the flavor of your choice. I didn’t include a frosting recipe this time because frosting is a very personal taste, especially for a birthday. Some people like lighter frostings. I’m a big fan of the heavy, sugary, Crisco-y bakery frostings. It really depends. But you always want to use people’s favorite frosting for their birthdays!

So go crazy with your cupcakes! And to my little one: happy birthday, sweetie!

Ingredients:

• 1 box devil’s food cake mix
• 1 box chocolate pudding mix (5 oz.)
• 1 cup sour cream (you can use light)
• 4 eggs
• 1/2 cup warm water
• 1 cup vegetable oil
• 1 package semi-sweet chocolate chips
• frosting of your choice

Instructions:

Preheat the oven to 350. Line two muffin tins (each holding 12 muffins) with festive liners.

In a bowl, mix all the ingredients except the chocolate chips until thoroughly combined. Stir in the chocolate chips.

Bake the cupcakes for 20-25 minutes until firm (see note below), but do not overbake or they will become dry. Allow the cupcakes to cool completely.

Using a decorating tip (I used a star tip), pipe the frosting generously on each cupcake and then use sprinkles or whatever else you like to enhance the top. I’m a big fan of edible airbrushing!

Note: If you are baking this recipe as a cake rather than as cupcakes, increase the baking time to about 30 minutes.

Now, many years and one Kitchen Aid mixer later, I am much wiser. But I still remember with fondness the recipes that were not epic fails when I was just starting out. And one in particular that I kept making time and time again were these cookie cupcakes. Because they worked. And because they were actually delicious.

These are peanut buttery without being too sweet or over-the-top intense.  They remind me of classic peanut butter cookies: same flavor, same happy nostalgic feel, same need for the glass of milk. But there’s more in each serving, more to bite into. The middle is nice and soft while the edges are chewy. And best of all, they have that Reese’s cup in the middle!

There’s something about Reese’s cups that have been baked. Their texture becomes even more irresistible, as though the best of the flavors come out in the heat of the oven. The shape of the peanut butter cup holds beautifully nestled among the cookie dough. Be sure to center your cups for an especially nice presentation.

By the way, I’ve done this recipe with tweaks. One time, just to be nutty, I put a full-sized Reese’s cup on the bottom of the muffin liner and then piled the cookie dough on top. Worked out great! There was a bite of Reese’s in every mouthful. You can also add chocolate or peanut butter chips, try it with mini Snickers bites, or even work in some Rolos for a nice caramel kick.

Whatever you do, eat them. It’s worth it to have that midday moment when all is still and the only thing you taste or feel is peanut butter and chocolate. I like that have that moment at least once a day. So take some time for yourself and try these!

Ingredients:

• 1/3 stick unsalted butter, softened
• 1 and 1/2 cups light brown sugar, firmly packed
• 1 and 3/4 cups flour
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 2 teaspoons baking powder
• 2 eggs
• 1 teaspoon vanilla
• 1/3 cup peanut butter (I used Jif natural-style)
• 12 miniature Reese’s cups, unwrapped

Instructions:

Preheat the oven to 350. Line 12 muffin cups and very lightly coat with cooking spray.

Combine all ingredients except the peanut butter cups in the bowl of a stand mixer. Beat until ingredients have formed a thick cookie dough. You may have to scrape down the bowl once or twice to get all the ingredients mixed.

Press the dough into each muffin liner until the cups are filled two-thirds of the way up. Once the dough is ready, press a miniature Reese’s cup into the center of each cookie cupcake.

Bake the cookie cupcakes for 15 minutes. Remove from the oven and let cool completely before eating. Store in an airtight container.