So I baked cupcakes over the weekend!

The cupcake craze landed in Beijing right about the same time I did, way back in 2009. Now, there is a gourmet cupcake shop near my office, two bakeries that deliver cupcakes to your door, and a trendy cafe that specializes in cupcakes.

Like everywhere else in the world, they are expensive little mofos, costing from 22 kuai ($3.49). For less than that, I could get a bowl of beef noodles and two rou bings for a not particularly healthy, but filling, dinner. Cost of living, folks. I don’t know why I have to pay U.S. prices for cupcakes in China, but it has something to do with bakers who are unwilling to use inferior Chinese ingredients.

I’ve only made cupcakes a handful of times with this tea cupcake set my sister got me a couple of Christmases ago. How charming! Too bad they only come in cute numbers, like four, so all that hard work gets eaten in the span of two minutes. That amount of effort is only justified for a few occasions.

So I’ve spent more than two years looking for a cupcake pan small enough for my oven. Not just for cupcakes, you know, but also muffins. But my oven is so small that even half-sized pans for mini muffins were too big! So I have mostly just been buying cupcakes.

But now, I don’t have an excuse to indulge in these delightfully sinful treats anymore! My mommy solved all of these problems in one go, and got me this appropriately pink cupcake maker for my birthday! I was finally able to test it out this weekend and made a batch of blueberry muffins and gingerbread cupcakes. This could be the start of something very exciting, like cupcakes every weekend!