1st birthday and vanilla cupcakes with chocolate buttercream

Its been a tough week in motherhood.  Most of my week has been spent walking around in a zombie like state.  My toddler has been sick awake with high fevers at night.  On top of that my darling boy has decided to boycott sleep and I have been surviving on 4 hours of sleep a night.  Now for many mums this is a norm but my kids are generally pretty good sleepers so a week of this out of no-where had me feeling very sorry for myself. On one particular bad morning I awoke to find there was no coffee in the house!  I nearly had a meltdown!  On the upside though the week has finished with my little girl feeling much better and my boy cutting his very first tooth!  I feel as though we've accomplished something huge here and my tough week was almost worth it.  There will be many more teeth to come and many more sleepless nights (speaking from experience) but my boy has started his road to growing up.

All these firsts are very special and the first year has many ups and downs with many achievements and many stressful moments too.  Its no wonder that the first birthday is so special.  This week I was able to make a cake just for this occasion.  I enjoyed making the cake and these cupcakes to go with it.  I had plans to share this recipe with you for a vanilla cupcake with chocolate buttercream as these were also my cupcakes of the week BUT sadly for you will not be sharing.  This recipe is just too good and I may just have to keep it to myself for awhile.  Maybe one day I pass it on to you but for now it is going to join my archives of recipes I will use for my cakes.