Christmas Tree Ornament Cupcakes

My mom told me that there was going to be a bake sale at the hospital that she volunteers at, so I took it as an opportunity to try out a holiday themed cupcake design. I went to my go to cupcake decorating design "Hello Cupcake" and went to the holiday section. They had a design for Christmas tree ornaments that are easy to make a large quantity of unique cupcakes. I ended up making four dozen cupcakes.

The cupcakes, although made the same, came out differently because I have problems keeping my oven at a constant temperature.

I made one dozen all red to look like the top of an ornament.

For one dozen I made a red stripe. I piped frosting on just where I wanted the red to go and dipped them in sprinkles.

Then I pipped on icing onto the rest of the cupcake and dipped it in the green sprinkles.

This gave a nice side view to the ornament.

Next I made the top of the ornament that is used to hang it onto the tree. I started by putting a spice drop onto a pretzel stick. This requires patience, practice, and the ability to cope with sticky fingers.

A Twizzler was added to the top to complete the hanger.

In addition to the green with red stripe, I made red with green strip cupcakes.

To jazz them up a bit more, I added cinnamon candies.

I loaded them up into trays to give a mixture of top views, side views, red, and green.

Then they headed off to the bake sale where I hope they added some holiday joy.

Nestle Mint Chocolate Delights

I was at the store with my Mom and we ran across the limited edition Dark Chocolate and Mint Morsels by Nestle Toll House. It was just a matter of saying "Hey Mom, check these out" and getting a response of "Put them in the cart." I decided to make the Mint Chocolate Delight recipe on the back of the package. It's like their normal chocolate chip recipe, except there is cocoa powder in the batter and the chocolate chips are a combination of dark chocolate chips and mint flavored chips.

I started baking them off and remembered why I have a love/hate relationship with chocolate cookies. The love part is simply that I love chocolate cookies. The hate part is that they are more difficult to tell when they are done cooking since you can't look for the golden brown color that you get with normal chocolate chip cookies. This is compounded for me by the fact that my oven is very temperamental and does not always have the correct temperature, so cooking time is always a game of guess and check for me.

With all of that being said, the only problem I had was with the smaller bite sized cookies. The package indicated that bite sized cookies could be made and I gave them a shot. However, they came out a little bit burnt on the bottom, because my oven doesn't like me. The normal sized ones, on the other hand, came out perfectly and taste like a thin mint cookie disguised as a chocolate chip cookie. I will definitely be looking for these chips again.