Housewarming Party and Vanilla Cupcakes

This weekend just gone we attended a housewarming party. It was held by the lovely Amy from Miss Jones Talks Makeup in celebration of her moving into a gorgeous new home. Please have a look at her blog - its full of fab tips on make up and product reviews.

Well, no housewarming party is complete without a batch of cupcakes so I got baking and whipped up some vanilla cupcakes. They are decorated with baby pink vanilla butter cream, a sugar flower and white glitter. I love this little cutter...incase you didn't notice I also used it for the flowers on the Vanilla Layer Cake.

It is a recent purchase and although a tad on the pricy side was well worth it. I will be getting alot of use out of it. It came as a little set with a metal cutter and a mould to give the veining details. They had all sorts of different flowers but this is the petunia. I used white flower paste for these flowers and then used a pink dust to give them the colour and put a silver ball in the centre. Don't they just look so cute!

A good time was had by all at the party and the cupcakes seemed to go down well. Thanks Amy for a fab night!

Vanilla Cupcakes and Nelson's 2nd Birthday

When I got invited to Nelson the dogs 2nd birthday party my brain starting working overtime thinking of ideas for themed cupcakes to take along to the party. Of course the party was more of an excuse for everyone to get together, have a natter and eat cake than a birthday party but Nelson seemed to love all the attention from everyone!

After much pondering I decided to stick with a vanilla cupcake. I used the recipe from the Love Bakery book - I love this recipe! It is by far the best vanilla cupcake recipe I have tried! I bought a little doggy bone and a little doggy paw cutter for the sugar decorations and kept to a blue and white theme. The only slight problem I encountered was colouring the butter cream - I wanted it to match the blue of the paws and bows but it hadn't crossed my mind that butter cream is off white....I ended up with green butter cream..panic!! I added a tad more of the colour and it seemed to right itself but ended up being a slightly darker shade - no one seemed to mind though as they tucked in!

Sorry about the poor pictures - I was literally running out the door with my cake box when I realised I hadn't taken any pictures!

Vanilla Cupcakes with Strawberry Icing and Chocolate Cupcakes

Happy Valentine's Day!

Happy Valentines Day to all my readers :) hope you all get lots of lovely treats and yummy chocs from your special someone.

I am not planning on doing much for Valentines Day this year. Last year as it was our first Valentines Day together we went all out on the presents...but this year we have just paid for our first holiday abroad together so are putting all of our money towards that instead..plus its our official 1 year anniversary next month so we have chosen to celebrate that instead.

We were going to go out for a romantic meal on saturday night to celebrate Valentines but in the end decided we were too poor to! We ended up making curry and naan breads at home and washing it all down with red wine. It was definitely the right decision to stay in...the food was luuurvely!

For a good few weeks I have been planning on making Valentines cupcakes. I couldn't make up my mind which sort to do so in the end I made two batches. The first was vanilla cupcakes topped with candy floss pink butter cream which was strawberry flavoured and then fondant red and pink hearts to decorate. The second batch was chocolate cupcakes with chocolate butter cream and a glittery pink sugar rose to decorate.

I was unsure how the strawberry flavoured butter cream would turn out..having never used flavourings before and only being able to get my hands on supermarket brand flavouring at the last minute, I was pleasantly surprised. The strawberry butter cream combined with the vanilla sponge made a nice change to just plain vanilla butter cream.

I felt a bit let down with my chocolate cupcakes...I have made the recipe before from the Primrose Bakery book and loved it but this time it just didnt turn out the same way as before and for some reason it seemed to spread side ways rather than rise and my cupcakes looked a bit of an odd shape.

Nevermind though... I think with the decorations they do look very cute!

Blueberry Burst Cupcakes

This is the first recipe I've made out of the Love Bakery cupcake book. This book is well worth a read for all you lovelys out there who like making cupcakes. The book is full of lots of fab recipes from the basic vanilla cupcake to more unusual flavours such as rhubarb and custard.

The sponge of these cakes is plain vanilla - I really liked this recipe for the sponge. It seemed to rise really well and was lovely and fluffy. I will definitely be using this recipe again when I want a batch of vanilla cupcakes.

I then used an apple corer to remove the centre of each cake and filled the cake with a spoonful of blueberry jam. I used St Dalfour's Wild Blueberry jam and it was definitely worth the extra pennies. The jam has a very high fruit content and is not sweetened with additional sugar but with fruit juice.

I then topped the cupcakes with a swirl of vanilla butter cream. The recipe called for cream cheese frosting but I'm always a bit against topping my cakes with this as they don't keep as well. I bought some new Wilton nozzles recently as I had got a little bored with using the same ones. I thought this one would make a nice alternative! I then popped a few blueberries on each cake.

Mars Bar Cupcakes

Last minute this weekend I decided I would bake some cupcakes. I've been wanting to try making Mars Bar Cupcakes for ages. I don't particularly like Mars Bars but I thought in cupcake form I would like them much better...and I did....these cupcakes are seriously yum!

I didn't actually have a recipe for these cupcakes. They are made up of a basic chocolate cupcake recipe with a chunk of Mars Bar baked into the centre. I then topped them with chocolate butter cream, caramel sauce, another chunk of Mars Bar and chocolate curls.

I so wanted home made caramel/toffee sauce on the top of these cupcakes and I set about making it using the recipe from the Primrose Bakery Cupcake. Toffee sauce just wasn't to be this weekend though. I made the recipe 4 times in total and used nearly a whole packet of sugar and every time it turned out wrong! Either I accidently boiled it too long and it turned back to sugar, or it was too runny or it was all grainy like sand..eugh...I don't know what was going wrong but it was a total disappointment and Karl was sent out on a mission at half 4 on Sunday to Tesco to find a decent toffee sauce! He succeeded and the cakes got coated in Tesco Finest Toffee Sauce. A bit of a cheat but tastes very good anyway!

Banoffee Cupcakes

I wasn’t actually planning on doing any baking today. I had the best intentions on Thursday night of baking on Sunday. I planned what I was going to bake and I went to the supermarket to get the ingredients. And then later that night I got the terrible news from my parents that my Gran had sadly passed away.

Although she had been ill with dementia for some time it was still such a shock. At the age of 18 I moved out from my parents house and went to live in Preston, where my gran lived, to go to uni. Over the last 7 years I became very close to my Gran...she helped and supported me when I left home, doing anything she could to make life easier for me. We could often be found having lunch out in preston and wandering round the shops. I would share all my gossip with her and she would give me advice on any dilemmas I had! She really was an amazing Gran and I am going to miss her so much.

I have therefore spent a huge part of the weekend feeling sad, not sleeping and bursting into tears at random and totally inappropriate momemts..i.e. the middle of the suit shop whilst trying to find a suit to wear to the funeral. It all got a bit too much...

This morning when I woke up I really didn’t know what to do with myself. I didn’t feel like I really wanted to go out anywhere but I didn’t want to just sit infront of the tv either. So I decided that I would do as I planned to do and bake! My Gran definitely wouldn't have wanted me sat around the house feeling upset thats for sure!

As I still had a packet of Oreos left and last weeks Oreo cupcakes went down so well with Karl's work mates I decided I would make these again. I also wanted to try something new and decided this was the weekend I'd make Banoffee Cupcakes out of the Eat Me book. I absolutely adore banoffee pie..(this is my mums fault as she has got a slight addiction to it and its obviously rubbed off on me) so the thought of a banoffee pie cupcake seemed very interesting indeed!

The first thing I had to do to make these cupcakes was make the toffee sauce which would go in the centre...apparently you could buy it ready made but me being me decided I would do it ‘properly’ and make it myself! The recipe said to use a can of condensed milk and boil it for 3 hours....how hard could that be? Well not hard at all really...but throughout the whole 3 hours I was sure that the can was going to explode at any moment...it didn’t..luckily!

Anyway, once the toffee sauce was done I set about making the banana cupcakes. It was a vanilla cupcake recipe with mashed up banana in it to flavour it...it smelt gorgeous even before cooking. A few months ago i tried a banana cupcake from a bakery near me and the cake was really heavy, so I was a little worried my cupcakes would turn out in similar state...luckily they didn’t and the banana flavoured the cakes perfectly. Unfortunately they didn’t rise quite as much as I’d have liked. I used different cupcake cases for these - they seemed very thin and wider than my usual ones so I'm wondering if this had anything to do with it...but I will definitely be going back to my usual ones next time!

Once the cakes were cool I hollowed out the centre and put toffee sauce into the cupcakes and also on the tops. I then piped swirls of vanilla butter creams onto the tops of the cakes and decorated with a dried banana piece. The recipe in the Eat Me booked recommended to use whipped cream and real bananas on the top of the cake...a lovely combination if the cakes were to be eaten right away, however the majority of these will probably be eaten tomorrow by which time the toppings may be a little past their best!

I possibly made the butter cream for these cakes a bit too thin and I don’t think my decorating was as tidy as I would have liked but I guess this can be forgiven due to how upset I have been and the baking definitely did what I wanted it to do... cheered me up a little this afternoon and took my mind off things.