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!

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.

Blue and pink edged cupcakes

After I made my black and white cupcakes I wanted to do some edged cupcakes again.

These lovelies were made with vanilla cakes and cream cheese frosting, I then edged with blue and pink ball sprinkles.

I actually used sprinkles from two different sets. I matched them up because they both have a similar matte look. Even though the blue ones came in a set with red and blue sprinkles I think the pink and blue look great together, it's sort of a blue-purple colour, lush!