Sending love (& cupcakes)

A family member recently had cancer related surgery. My family has gotten updates every so often and after the most recent update, we knew we wanted to send love in a big way! In the past, when supporting a loved one from a distance, we've looked up bakeries/flower shops close to them. That works great but it can get a little pricey. This time we thought we would try baking at home and express mailing it. I volunteered to make the cupcakes and my dad took care of all the packaging and mailing details.

I made my favorite cupcake recipe - I made a half recipe so I ended up with 12. You may notice that I make these cupcake all the time. I am not adventurous when it comes to cupcakes (especially when I'm feeding others!) because I just trust this recipe so much! It's delicious and it works every time! You can find the recipe HERE.

Then, I made a half recipe of my favorite buttercream frosting - you can find the recipe HERE. I used half of the icing to spread over the top of the cupcakes. I used a frosting knife and did my best to make the tops as flat as possible.

I mixed a little pink food coloring into the remaining frosting and loaded it into a piping bag. I used a wide flat tip to pipe pink ribbons on the cupcakes.

My family had a discussion about what we wanted to put on the cupcakes - we discussed pink frosting, plain white frosting with pink sprinkles, plain white frosting with words like 'hope,' 'strength,' 'love'... written on top and finally plain white frosting with a pink ribbon on top. We eventually decided on the pink ribbon because while representing cancer, it also symbolizes hope for the future. And this is exactly what we wanted to send. Hope.

We packaged the cupcakes in some little plastic cupcake containers that we picked up from Ares (a local kitchen supply store!). They could not have been more helpful in this process!! And we sent them with express mail, so they arrived in just under 12 hours! Amazing!! I am so excited to do this more in the future!