Simple and Peanut-Free Cupcakes

On Sundays, my family likes to get together for "family dinner".  Yesterday, my sister hosted and made a ham, mashed potatoes, salad, beans, glazed carrots... oh and rolls, of course.  A feast, really. It was great!

I offered to make cupcakes.  My nephew, Jonathan, has a peanut allergy so we have to be pretty careful with baked goods.  At girls night a couple weeks ago, Rebecca brought mini cupcakes from Crumbs bakery.  They all had special little toppings and frosting flavors.  They were so good and served as my inspiration for yesterday's cupcakes.

To make my life easy, I decided to go with a boxed mix and then make the frosting from scratch.  My sister recommended a peanut-free brand that was available in the organic section (I also like this mix b/c it has very minimal ingredients). Graham crackers and chocolate chips that were processed in facilities without peanuts were sitting right next to the box on the shelf so I picked up those, too!

While the cupcakes were baking, I organized the toppings onto little plates.

I setup my kitchen table as the frosting/dipping table.

So I made two frostings.  Recipe via Giada here. I didn't make two batches separately like she does in the video. I just frosted the vanilla ones first and then added in the jam and more powered sugar to make the strawberry frosting.

Frost, dip, pack & serve.

Safe to say the kids enjoyed :)

Have a great week... make it awesome. xo.