Pink and orange cupcakes

Over the past few months my family and friends have been buying sprinkles for me wherever they see them. I got sprinkles as presents for Christmas and every time I see my mum she's found some more in the £1 shop, or somewhere like that.

I've also been buying sprinkles wherever I can. In fact, I jump at the chance to go to a different supermarket just so I can check out their sprinkle collection. I know have a huge cupboard dedicated to sprinkles and baking goods which is ridiculous in my small kitchen!

Pink and orange is one of those colour combinations that you don't often see together but I personally love. On my sprinkle journeys I've picked up a few sets which I can then match together, even if they didn't come together - this includes orange, pink, white and yellow stars from Asda, pink hundreds and thousands from Sainsburys and orange and pink jimmies that I got as a present. They were my inspiration for last Sunday's cupcakes.

I also did a little experiment with the frosting based on something I saw in Sainsbury's magazine a few months back: I split the frosting into two parts and coloured one with pink food colouring. Then I added both parts into one piping bag so it would come out half pink and half white.

I made vanilla cakes in orange and pink cases with the two-colour cream cheese frosting and decorated with the pink and orange sprinkles.

Rainbow cupcakes

If a rainbow could be made into a person, that person would be a lot like my friend Jane. Everything you could say to describe a rainbow describes Jane - bright, happy, magical, rare.

I made these rainbow cakes in celebration of Jane's birthday. I didn't see Jane for her birthday but I made these at home in tribute of when we were at uni together and would bake cakes. In fact, Jane taught me a recipe for cupcakes that has now developed into the recipe that I use every week.

So firstly, I made my favourite vanilla cake recipe but before cooking I split the batter. I would recommend that you split it equally into six bowls and then mix your colours.

I didn't split them equally and I regretted it. I tried to have a little more red so I could then add blue to make purple, etc. But as you can see from my pics I ended up with hardly any purple batter and therefore tiny cakes. Whereas I had loads of red and green batter and ended up with an unevenly sized batch.

To mix the colours all you need is red, yellow and blue food colouring and then combine them to make the colours in between. Red + yellow = orange. Yellow + blue = green. Blue + red = purple. If you can find orange, green and purple food colouring however, you are likely to get better colour that is less muddy. I already had green so I just mixed red and yellow to make orange and red and blue to make purple.

I added the food colouring directly to the batter instead of mixing it first. That meant I could see exactly what effect the colouring had on the batter. As the batter has a yellow tint anyway I needed to use more food colouring on the blue and purple to lose the yellow-ish colour.

I used coloured cases to match to add to the effect and after they were baked I frosted them with cream cheese frosting and sprinkled with rainbow coloured hundreds and thousands.

Malteaser cupcakes

A few weeks ago I was browsing flickr for some inspiration and I found these gorgeous Malteaser cakes by Monniecakes. Not just one but three Malteasers on one cake? Yum!

So, I made these with my favourite chocolate cake recipe and piped cream cheese frosting on the top. Then I topped the cakes with three Malteasers each. Sooo tasty.

For a little variation on this you could put Malteasers actually in the cake, either a whole one per cake, or crumbled up in the mixture. That would be delicious - a little like those Easter eggs with Malteaser bits in the chocolate.

Above you can see them on the new cake stand that I got for Christmas from my beautiful boyfriend.

Cream cheese frosting recipe

Most recipes only use cream cheese frosting for rich cakes like carrot or red velvet but I like this frosting on any cake, even your basic vanilla. This will be enough to frost 12 cupcakes or 6 large muffins.

Ingredients

• 100g Soft cheese (also known as cream cheese, I prefer Philadelphia)
• 25g Unsalted butter (at room temperature)
• 125g Icing sugar

Instructions

1. Add all the ingredients into a bowl with high sides (suitable for whisking).
   
2. Mix the soft cheese, unsalted butter and icing sugar with a spoon until you have a porridge-like texture (I find this step necessary so you don't get covered in a cloud of icing sugar in the next step).
3. Use an electric whisk to blend the frosting. Don't stop until all lumps of butter and cheese are whisked away (literally!) and it becomes light and fluffy - whisk for longer to make it thicker.
4. Spread over your cupcakes with a spatula or fill a zip lock bag, snip the corner and pipe.
   

The longer you whisk the frosting the thicker it will become and therefore the easier to pipe but it will be ready to spread over your cupcakes as soon as all lumps are gone.

These are the reasons I love cream cheese frosting:

• This recipe will transform any cupcake, even if you have cooked them a little too long and they are a bit crisp on top - they will still taste delicious.
  
• I find that this frosting helps to keep your cakes nice and moist if you eat them gradually over a week like me and it doesn't separate over time like butter cream.
• The frosting comes out in very white so you can add any colour to it and get a great effect. White also goes with any colour of sprinkles.