Sometimes in life, it is satisfying just to do the simple things well. So this afternoon, Alice and I decided to try baking and decorating a batch of humble vanilla cupcakes, with a diabetic-friendly twist of course! We used my ever-reliable vanilla cupcake recipe, but with a few key changes; we swapped the caster sugar for xylitol sugar-substitute, and increased the volume of milk as I’ve found that the sugar substitutes tend to dry out the batter. Additionally, from experience I know that a slightly lower oven temperature, coupled with a slightly longer baking time, seems to work well, so we reduced the temperature by ten degrees and increased the bake time by five minutes. After baking and cooling, we iced them with diabetic-friendly vanilla buttercream icing, and then our one cheat-treat was to use real sugar hundreds & thousands for decoration. Alice had real fun letting her 3-year-old creative self go wild! The result was a fun afternoon, and a tasty diabetic-friendly tea-time dessert.