Peppermint Frosting

This is a great way to add a little holiday flare to an old standard. This was my aunts birthday cupcakes, so I made these gluten free cupcakes with the frosting. And added some crushed candy canes to it. Looks pretty good if I do say so myself!

Ingredients:
1 stick of butter softened
1 cup of powder sugar
1 tsp of peppermint extract
2 candy canes
(optional: red food coloring)

Directions:
Blend the butter till creamed. Then add the powdered sugar. Mix till well combined. Finally add in the peppermint extract. (I then added red food coloring to half the batch).

Frost your cupcakes however you want, knife, pastry bag or just a sandwich bag. Stripe the red and white frosting together to get a candy cane look. Mine was put on with a bag, and unfortunately the red bleed into the white too much, and didn't look as stripy as i wanted it too.

Put the candy canes into a sandwich bag, without the plastic wrapping on the canes. Then crush them with a rolling pin. Sprinkle them on top of the frosting and you have one festive cupcake!

Reindeer Cookies

These are so cute to give away for the holidays. I made these last year to give as gifts. They were eaten fast, which is good since the antlers are prone to fall off. The cookie is gluten free, and you can find the recipe here for the cookie. The chocolate covered pretzels, which I like the look of better, are gluten free. However for the taste I enjoyed the slated pretzels best, it give that salty sweet flavor that I love a lot. 

Ingredients: 

The makings for peanut butter cookies (could make almost any cookie if you wanted, but here is a link for quick peanut butter cookies that I like) 

1 large bag of m&ms

1 bag of pretzels (use gluten free pretzels) 

Directions: 

Once you take the cookies out of the oven set in the pretzels on the top of the cookie at an angle. Place two brown m&m's in the middle of the cookie like eyes. Then add the red m&m as the Rudolph nose! You can have blue and green eyed reindeer as well, which I did after a while since I ran out of brown m&m's. Set on a cooling rack and let the decorations set. Then you will be ready to spread the cheer!