Valentine's pictogram cupcakes

Now, this is probably one for Cake Wrecks but this idea was fueled by the fantastic authors of Hello Cupcake! The blog that goes with the book last week happened to feature some ideas for Valentine's pictograms - "I love you" and "Cutie pie".

I used the "I love you" idea to create my own and then I decided to make it more personal. So, just to explain the rest of the pictogram, my boyfriend is called Andy but I tend to call him Pandy because it rhymes and is the name of the kid's TV character. So, I create a Pan (check out my fried egg!) and a D.

Now, I needed to complete the set with something that ideally illiterates with "Pandy" and rhymes with "you". Starts with a P, rhymes with "you". Now what could that be...

Oh yeah, POO!

I love you, Pandy poo.

Lavendar cupcakes

These cupcakes were made using the recipe in the the Hummingbird Bakery Cookbook. I found the idea of using lavender in a cake a little strange but then I'm not keen on many flavoured sponges. I don't like orange, lemon, earl grey or anything weird like that. Chocolate, caramel, peanut butter though?? Yum, yum, yum - give me more!

My boyfriend's mum however, said they looked delicious! So, I thought I'd give them a go for her birthday and as a thank you present for helping Andy to move in with me.

It was a little bit of a task to find the lavender in the first place. My local health food shop technically does carry it but they didn't have any on the shelves for two weeks and I almost had to give up on the idea.

Finally I found a stockist: my local potpourri shop. The owner assured me that the lavender had not gone through any fragrance enhancing oils or processes - it was just plain lavender.

I was still quite concerned that it would be too strong a flavour but once I got back to the recipe book I realised you don't actually put the lavender in the batter mix but you infuse the milk in the recipe with lavender by putting it in the fridge for a few hours then straining the milk before it goes into the mix and the same for frosting.

Well, the certainly look beautiful. To me they didn't taste great, a little like Grandma's cupboard but hopefully, Andy's mum liked them! She hasn't called to say so though, and I heard her asking Andy on the phone what flavour they were supposed to be. I suppose it's the thought that counts!

Lost cupcakes

Lost is one of my favourite programmes and just after the new season started I saw the Lost cupcakes post on my Cupcakes Take the Cake RSS feed. What inspiration! My favourite is the cake with a polar bear. Rarrr!

I had a great idea to use the white chocolate polar bears from Ben & Jerry's Baked Alaska flavour. So, rather than pick the bears out of a tub and suck the ice cream off, I headed to the Ben & Jerry's stand in Leeds' Vue cinema. They sell the white chocolate polar bears as toppings when you buy a scoop of ice cream and I persuaded the B & J girl to put some in a sweet box for me for the same price. She really wasn't sure and went to ask her manager first!

I made my favourite vanilla recipe with cream cheese frosting then created "the numbers" with black writing icing. I was so nervous to write the numbers out! I'm sure they will bring me the worst luck. I can't even write them out on the keyboard.

To get the thick black text of the LOST letters I used a black icing tube. These tubes seem to be in every supermarket at the moment in attempt to cash in on the "baking boom".

Then I created the island cupcakes using one stripe each of green, white and blue coloured frosting. The blue was a nice sea colour so I left that with no extra sprinkles and I covered the white with crumbled up Digestive biscuits to create a sandy beach. I then used green chocolate coated sunflower seeds and green writing icing to create a "jungle" effect on the green stripe. Finally, I added the white chocolate polar bears to the jungle to finish the cakes off.

Triple chocolate heart shaped muffins

Using my favourite chocolate cake recipe with white and milk chocolate chips I made these muffins in some heart shaped silicon muffin cases that I got for Christmas. These were perhaps a little more well cooked than I normally would like but I am really please with the shape.

Silicon cases are a pretty good idea: far less wasteful than paper cases; they come in lots of different shapes (hearts, stars, flowers & more); and you don't need a cupcake baking tray to use them. I have found that some are harder to take the cake out of than others but just make sure that that cakes are completely cool before trying to remove them and the thicker the silicon case, the easier they are to remove.

Chocolate and hazlenut cupcakes

My second new recipe of last week was these DELICIOUS chocolate and hazelnut cupcakes with nutella frosting from the Hummingbird Bakery Cookbook. They taste just like Nutella and match my cake stand perfectly.


I made these for my mum - she always comes over and eats ALL my cupcakes which I normally would eat gradually over a week! She's a chocoholic (a genetic trait) but still couldn't manage to eat all of these because they are so rich and filling.

Although the recipe is from a British bakery they do recommend you use American-style cupcake cases which are more like Muffin-size cases and all their cupcake recipes are based on this size. I still used normal cupcake size cases so my cakes where probably a little larger than most cupcakes and I had quite a bit of mixture left over - probably enough to make another 6 or so cakes.

I do like the recipes in this book - they all use milk in the mixture which makes them so moist. Once I've worked out the right amount I may start adding milk to my favourite vanilla and chocolate cake recipes.

Circus cupcakes with Marshmallow frosting

Last week was a week of new recipes for me (more new recipes later). Firstly I did these vanilla cakes with Marshmallow frosting based on the "Almost-homemade vanilla buttercream" recipe from Hello Cupcake - I'm not sure why it is called buttercream when it is more about the marshmallow than the butter, but nevermind! P.S. This book is soooo inspiring.


I was attracted to this recipe because it uses Marshmallow Fluff, which isn't readily available here in the UK, but my local Powerplay have started to stock American sweets including Marshmallow Fluff in Raspberry, Blueberry and Original flavour. So, if I can master this recipe then I can hopefully, try a Raspberry version, yum, yum, yum!

Now, the recipe is a bit weird for me firstly because it is measured in "cups", wtf?! We don't measure things in cups in the UK, I've never heard of that as a measurement. But after some googling I worked out that 3 1/2 cups is about 805g and that is the second weird thing... 800 grams of frosting??! Wow, I'm frosting 12 cupcakes, not 1200!

So I made an eighth of the original recipe using half the jar of Marshmallow Fluff. I had used the first half in a batch of frosting that did NOT come out well, the frosting sank into the cakes and was an overall disaster. But this batch was great, after whipping the Fluff for quite a while it was nice and thick and was so white - perfect for adding colour if you choose to.

The theme was inspired by a circus party that was posted on Party Perfect so I used some spotty cases that I've had in my stash for a while and all of my sprinkles with a primary colour theme: chocolate beans, martha stewart jimmies in red and yellow, hundreds & thousands and sugar dots that my mum got for me on her trip to Germany.

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.