Teacher Appreciation Day

I intend to be a planner-aheader...every year, I intend to do something nice for the teacher gifts...and every year, it pretty much ends up being a last minute thing:-/ Errrgh.

So TONIGHT is teacher appreciation - and I thought about just getting Starbucks gift cards - but then I added up how much that would cost me (giving each teacher a $10 card...'cause $5 seems a little cheap...it's like only 1 cup 'a joe). Now that I don't have Ardyn full time anymore, I can't really afford to go "all out" like that, honestly. Not if we still want to eat food next week.

I polled fb friends for what they liked giving/getting, and what do you know, baked goods ranked pretty high (whew!). I can do baked goods!! AND I can do them TODAY. Haha!!

I made a few gift tags with my craft supplies - I used all scrap papers  in fact, so very frugal of me:-)

I decided on Cafe Mocha flavoured cupcakes...chocolate cake from scratch (this recipe), and coffee buttercream (this recipe).

All things considered, pretty affordable - the only thing I didn't have in my cupboards was the fun size hershey's, which I picked up for $1.79

I didn't have quite enough coffee buttercream to do all the cupcakes, but I had some leftover chocolate in the fridge from Brooks' cake! Yay!

The cupcake boxes I had - they are 5.30 for 3 boxes...the clear single ones were 4.50 for 10 I believe...I already owned the twine and string...so for the cost of ingredients, incidental craft supplies and a few cupcake boxes, I think we have a pretty acceptable "thank you" to give:-)

Cute!!

Single serve!