Valentines Cupcakes - Just Bake

So Valentines is coming up and you either love it or hate it, it is of course another holiday that comes with the possibility of baking - so of course I love it!

I was asked by Just Bake to create some cute cupcakes for them to get in the spirit and they sent me some gorgeous looking chocolate golden hearts (£2.90)* to do the job with. I really love using gold in baking as it used to be so hard to do, but with cupcake decorations like these it's much easier to add some glam to your cakes.

As it's Valentines coming up I thought the best cupcakes to make were of course red velvet, so I used my favourite recipe. Not even the most rugged of men could refuse these bad boys, and if you're just baking them for yourself - then so what, indulge!!

So for the decoration I decided on the classic cream cheese icing, there really is no other choice for red velvet in my opinion. As the classic symbol for love is a heart I thought I'd make these the focus for the decoration. On some I covered them in gold hearts, dotted them around, artisticly placed a couple of top - and of course drenched them in my trademark love for edible glitter!

Some I covered in gold glitter and the others I added lashings of hot pink glitter for the girly eaters.

I also added a copious amount of gold sugar balls and some love heart cupcake wrappers. I love how glitzy they came out...I may have sneaked a few of the chocolate hearts before...just you know, to check they weren't poisoned, would be silly not to wouldn't it?

What is everyone else baking for Valentines? Can't wait to see what everyone else comes up with. Pin It Now!

Flowers and Butterflies Giant Cupcake

It feels like a while since I did a giant cupcakes, it probably hasn't actually been that long, maybe I was just having withdrawals! So I was really happy when I was asked to make a girly giant cupcake for the weekend. My favourite brief as you all know, I love the doing girly ones I find them so easy I seem to make them without thinking which leaves me more time to clean up the kitchen I've just completely destroyed!

I think flowers look really lovely on a cake and I've done so many with hearts and stars on I thought maybe flowers would be a nice look and perfect for the girly theme. I made blue fondant rolled roses dusted with gold cake glitter Choccywoccydoodah style. I still had some rice paper butterflies left so thought these would look really nice dotted around the flowers and leaves, I did think about making fondant butterflies but these are so detailed and delicate they were much cuter.

The actual cake is vanilla as is the buttercream which is coloured with pink liquid colour and beaten within an inch of it's life! The bottom, the 'case' is covered in jam and white fondant which looks really crisp against the pink top. As the roses have gold glitter I thought a nice gold sparkly bow would match quite nicely, I didn't tie it all the way round as it's a wide ribbon it looked a bit heavy so a big bow looked perfect.

I have another cake to do over the weekend, so lookout for another post soon :)

Nom! Pin It Now!

4th Birthday Snow White Giant Cupcake

So it's that time of year again, my niece's birthday and this time she turns four.  I've made her a birthday cake the last two years so this one could be no exception.

The first one I made was an In The Night Garden Cake, and while I loved it, I was very new to it and didn't even level the layers! So it was very lumpy and bumpy. This is what gave me the cake bug! The next year I made her a little princess castle cake, I hadn't researched it much but I think it turned out well.

This year she is still very much into the princess theme, Disney Princess to be precise, and Snow White in particular, I've lost count of all the times she made up watch that film! And while I'm not sure how making Snow White would actually look, so I thought maybe another giant cupcake would look good. I know I make a lot of these, but she loves cupcakes so I though it would be quite fitting. I decided to make it in the theme of Snow White's dress rather than what she actually looks like.

The base is covered with blue fondant icing, coloured with Baby Blue sugarflare paste, and the red stripes in Christmas Red. I made the buttons from Melon yellow, wet them and covered them in cake glitter, not shimmer - girls can never have too much glitter and she ate these the first!.

For the top part I rose iced it with melon yellow buttercream, and dusted it with yellow shimmer this time. I decided to put the 'posion apple' on the front, though for obvious reasons this was posion free! To make this I just carved an apple shape from the christmas red fondant, brushed it with corn syrup and drenched it in red cake glitter and left it to dry. I used the corn syrup rather than water so it would still look shiny. I then piped on a stalk and the number four.

Luckily she loved the cake, we ate it for breakfast and the rest went home with her. Unluckily I seem to find glitter EVERYWHERE and have a feeling it's going to be around for a while...at least it will make the kitchen look a bit more magical! Pin It Now!