Holiday Delights

Happy New Year! There has been a lot of dessert relishing over the holidays, but I'll just highlight a few experiences over the past few weeks.

At my regular day job, a group of us go out for lunch often. When each person in our group has a birthday, we take them out for lunch and devour cupcakes – usually from Crave. Just before Christmas, we had a birthday lunch for my coworker and friend, Rob. During our lunch, our waiter had a little mishap with the box of cupcakes, almost dropping them. While most of the cupcakes survived, Rob's unfortunately did not. It was a cupcake catastrophe! For consolation, the restaurant gave him a slice of cake and another coworker, Melissa, picked up a replacement cupcake as well.

For the month of December, Crave had a few holiday cupcakes; one of which I decided to try, which was gingerbread. It was a gingerbread cake with cream cheese frosting and a little fondant gingerbread man on top. It was definitely delish. I loved it! It's one of those things that comes around only once a year, so it's definitely crave-able.

The fiance and I (yes, we got engaged on Christmas) spent time with our families and encountered desserts everywhere we went. But one night while in the Tampa, Florida area, we ventured over to Gigi's. We had the Nodini cannoli (top left and bottom right), fiance had Italian cream (top right) and I had butterscotch dream (bottom left).

The first cupcake I chowed down on was butterscotch dream, which is butterscotch cake and filling with toasted vanilla frosting and rimmed with coconuts and pecans. I'm not a fan of coconut and pecans, so I picked them off (a bit tedious to do). The cake part was good, but it got even better when I got to the butterscotch filling.

Fiance's first cupcake was Italian cream, which was Italian cream cake topped with cream cheese frosting and toasted coconut. I tried a bite of his and thought it was pretty tasty.

Fiance and I were anxious to try our cannoli cupcakes, which is amaretto cake filled and topped with cannoli cream and topped with a mini cannoli. This cupcake did not disappoint. It was as good as we anticipated, so well worth trying. The cannoli on top was very yummy as was the rest of the cupcake.

Keep watching for the cupcake quests to continue this year! Even though I said I needed a break in my last post. Ha! Who am I kidding?