Gingerbread Cupcakes: Baking Cupcakes in Jars

For Christmas, I decided I wanted to send cupcakes to my relatives. There's just one problem with shipping cupcakes - how the hell do you keep them looking pretty? Well, apparently you bake them in mason jars. Genius right? I know! Yeah, wouldn't have figured that out without Pinterest...seriously, that website makes me look so freaking smart!

Since it was Christmas time I determined the perfect cupcakes to make (courtesy of the cupcake bible) would be gingerbread cupcakes. Gingerbread is probably one of my favoritest flavors ever. Remember how I mentioned I love Starbucks? Well, every year I look forward to them bringing out their holiday syrups because that is when I get to indulge in gingerbread lattes every time I come across a Starbucks. Which is every two blocks here...I'm not exaggerating.

Anywho, so gingerbread cupcakes! The batter was awesome. It was sweetened with maple syrup though, which kind of threw me off because I'm going through the recipe and I was like "...where the fuck is the sugar?" Yeah...used to forget ingredients. Took me a good ten minutes before I realized that maple syrup is, well, syrup and therefore sugar. Yes I sat there in my kitchen feeling like an utter dumbass. That genius feeling from earlier was definitely gone.

Then I continued making these awesome cupcakes by putting the batter in the jars. I decided to make 18 of them because that kind of fit nicely on the cookie sheet and that would be more than enough so that I would have plenty to send to everyone. Getting the batter in the jars wasn't the problem, it was getting them in the oven without dropping them all. Let's just say that the jars are slippery.

I highly recommend that if you ever do this, pretend you are a forklift. That's really the best way I can describe just how precise you should be with your movements so that they don't slip around all over the cookie sheet and turn into an amazing juggling act.

They had a lemon buttercream frosting that went just right with them. And I topped them with chopped crystallized ginger. I decorated the top of the jars too.

And also made a couple in regular cupcake wrappers.