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Right. Alan Rickman’s birthday is Wednesday, February 21, which means of course that it’s time to make celebratory cupcakes. Unfortunately, the selection in Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World is overwhelming, so I’ve had to enlist the help of Cindy, Christi, and Sarah — who, of course, voted for entirely different categories of cupcakes, but at least that helped narrow it down a bit. I swear that, every time I flip through the book, I find myself completely incapable of deciding; every page I turn presents me with a recipe that looks at least equally exciting, if not more exciting that the thing I’d just decided to make.

My plan at the moment is to make half recipes of the Brooklyn Brownie Cupcakes, Gingerbread Cupcakes with Lemony Icing, and, if I can make it over to Teavana and they actually have matcha in stock, the Green Tea Cupcakes (I even have marzipan for decorations!). If no matcha is to be had, I’ll probably go for the Chai Latte Cupcakes instead, to give a bit of variety. I’ll also need to find something big enough to carry 18-20 cupcakes, and make little signs explaining what the cupcakes are and why they’re being given away at work. (Purely for coordination purposes, I plan to celebrate a day early: it’s a three-day weekend, so I can assemble the cupcakes on Monday; there’s just no way I’m going to bake cupcakes for other people on a Tuesday night after working all day. Cupcakes for myself, fine — but if they’re going to be prettied up as far as my limited decorating skills allow, I need more time than a weekday evening will allow.)

Of course, my plans do kind of depend on my fingers not being numb from the cold. At the moment, I can barely type; on the up side, though, my toes were already numb from lingering nerve damage from wearing stupid shoes at the Dallas meeting (over two weeks now, but at least it’s getting a little better, slowly).

In other news, I finally got around to uploading my backlog of photos to Flickr; mostly they date back to December, but a couple are leftovers from Stockholm in November. I’ve also added a couple new editorial-type blogs to the blogroll, and changed the “British Blogs” category to a more general “European” category, to account for the inclusion of an American ex-pat living in Stockholm (you should imagine me making an envious moue here). Just general blogkeeping activities that I’ve let slide over the past stressed-out weeks.