Since my birthday is this month, it's been a weird experience to have a normally celebratory time of the year for me coincide with the start of the pandemic (last year) and the one-year milestone observations (this year). Though I'm not a huge birthday person, it has felt really strange to celebrate on my own for two years in a row now, forgoing my preferred method of celebrating: sharing a meal with friends and enjoying some delicious gluten and dairy-free sweets.
Feeling uninspired and riding another wave of quarantine burnout, I was totally going to forgo any celebration this year until my mom surprised me with a intriguing cupcake kit from PastryBase. Cutely packaged and promising cupcakes that tasted as good as they looked (while being gluten-free and vegan!), the kit proved to be the perfect pick-me-up, and fantastic real world application of the Great British Bake Off skills I hope I've learned in binging all the seasons this past year.
