If I'm covered in sugar and flour, it must be Christmas Eve

It's tradition in my family that several hours to half of the day before a major holiday is spent in the kitchen.  And the work is not done until everyone in the kitchen is at least lightly coated with a bit of flour or confectioners sugar...maybe a few grease stains on pants legs or favorite t-shirts.  Perhaps there is also a new red mark on a forearm from carelessly pulling hot pans out of the oven and grazing the heat source in the process...

The payoff is always worth the mess and the hours spent chopping, mixing, dropping and burning.  This year I had the pleasure of introducing Dip and Dap, my 2 and 4 year-old nieces, to the tradition of baking Christmas cookies from scratch and leaving a few for Santa (or Janta as Dap prefers to call him).  The sugar cookie recipe I used this year was pretty good, but even better after Dip and Dap sprinkled on copious amounts of yellow and pink sugar crystals.  In case you didn't know, yellow and pink are the new red and green of the holiday season.  Dip was so excited by this new trend that she pounded the bottle of yellow sugar into the cookies, creating little half-moon indentations.  An extra special touch.

The cookies are pretty good, but what truly blew FatCat's mind this year are the apple pie cupcakes with vanilla buttercream frosting she made from scratch.  One of my favorite fatty girls put me on to this recipe a few days ago and I couldn't resist trying this out.  I did make a few changes though--I wasn't feeling the concept of an open-faced cupcake so after sauteing the apples in salted butter, cinnamon and sugar, I layered them in between two tablespoons of cupcake batter.  This resulted in a yummy apple pie-like surprise a couple of bites into the cupcake.  I probably should have taken a picture after I bit into it to show y'all.  Next time.