Great Day Cupcakes

In this house, we love cupcakes. We love them for special occasions like birthdays and baby showers, but we also love them for dessert, and even just because. A couple months ago, L said that we should make chocolate cupcakes. When I asked him why he said, “Because we are all out!” That seemed like as good a reason as any to me! I love cake and cupcakes, too!

Recently, my four year old, L, had a great day at Preschool. He has been having a tough time adjusting to being in a classroom, so it was reason to celebrate. We whipped up these “Great Day” cupcakes. It was also a great excuse to try out the new CoolWhip Frosting… yum!

We started by going shopping for our ingredients (and to pick up groceries). If you want to see our shopping experience, you can see my google+ shopping album here. The CoolWhip frosting can be found in the freezer section.

I tell myself that making cupcakes is educational – L helps me by looking at the pictures and reading the directions for me. Water, oil, eggs.

He develops fine motor skills as he puts in the cupcake wrappers.

 And he’s learning measuring and numbers as we add all the ingredients! More reasons that every day is a great day when you make cupcakes!

 I let him do the first mixing, and then take over after it gets too hard. I do have to watch closely here, though… I don’t want the bowl to fall to the ground while he’s busy concentrating on mixing. Also, he has a tendency to stick his finger in the bowl to taste the batter!

 After baking the cupcakes, we let them cool. Applying frosting to warm cupcakes isn’t usually a good idea – it will often melt the frosting and slip right off! While the cupcakes cooled, I grabbed the CoolWhip frosting. This is new and tastes exactly how you would think the love child of CoolWhip and frosting would taste! It needs to sit on the counter for an hour to thaw. We might’ve grabbed a spoon and tasted before the full hour was up, though!

 My favorite cupcakes as a kid always had a heaping mound of frosting on them. This is easy to do with the CoolWhip Frosting! Just grab a spoon and pile it on! The fluffy texture lends itself well to mountains of frosting… yum!

Of course we had to add sprinkles. And adding sprinkles is serious business!