Happy National Cupcake Day 2018!

You read the title of today's post correctly. Today is National Cupcake Day, December 15rh, as it is every year. Sometimes I make cupcakes at our house. They are nice way to do portion control but they can also be tricky at parties if I use the cupcake tree to showcase them on. No one wants to take the first one! But you can enjoy cupcakes without calories as well and today I'm going to share a book with you that heavily features cupcakes without one single recipe or calorie! I was sent a free paperback copy of this book via the Amazon Vine program in exchange for an interview on their website; this article is a bonus for them.

Don't Call Me Cupcake by Tara Sheets is a pretty standard paranormal romance. The paranormal aspect involves the surviving members of the Holloway family... yeah, it made me think of Charmed's Halliwell family, too. I did some looking into paranormal family books and found out that "H" surnames are really common; not sure why. But Emma and Juliette Holloway are little like the Charmed Ones in most other ways.

While I'm not a huge romane reader, I have read a few foodie cozy mystery novels so I decided to give this book a try because I hoped it would fit into our chocolatey theme here on this blog. There is a mystery here but more about the background of the potential lovers. As is common in romance novels, both Emma and Hunter have lost at love in tragic ways and had challenging childhoods. I could complain that both are common in romances but heck, these are common in many novels and in life, too.

The "cupcake" of the title plays a strong role, more so than in many foodie mysteries I've read so that pleased me a great deal. Plus no recipes that may or may not work well if you try them. The recipes are all titles and descriptions of the magic they do with one or two ingredients mentioned. Yes, there are chocolate cupcakes as well as cupcakes of all different flavors. Each of them have magic that gives the eater a bonus or a curse depending on how the Holloway sisters feel about the person they make it for. I found it refreshing that the food was central without taking over.

In terms of the writing, meh, it was pretty standard quality for the low erotic romance style. I don't a play by play with horrible euphemisms but a bit more than kiss and then the next morning would be nice. This is a novel for adults not kids, right? The internal angst of our two main characters was luckily less than I feared and no internal gods or penises were addressed.

This was better than I thought it would be but I'm still not interested enough to read book two in the series.