Mad about cupcakes

Cupcakes are a firm favourite of mine, I like eating them but I love decorating them. I especially like how you can choose to stop at one or eat as many as you like. Most of what I do is self taught from piping to now making more and more intricate cupcake toppers. It's so easy to whip up a batch and spend a good few hours messing round with the decorations and trying new things out. This post is a dedication to the versatile, underestimated favourite of mine:


Made for my friend's 23rd birthday this year. Plain vanilla with butter cream icing and hand made butterflies:



White chocolate chip and raspberry cupcakes:




Plain vanilla with rainbow icing:




Plain cupcakes covered in fondant icing and decorated with hand made flowers:




More plain ones, just practicing my icing:




Halloween cupcakes made for a friends birthday. Finished off with hand made toppers which I painted:

Cinnamon & blackberry cake

Continuing on the blackberry theme (I still have two bags left in my freezer to use up) this week I chose to make a cinnamon & blackberry cake from Sainsbury's magazine. Cinnamon is such a lovely spice and reminds of dark nights and Christmas time. This recipe used wholemeal flour, which is not something I have come across before but it goes very well with the cinnamon and lovely filling of; cream, blackberries and blackberry jam. My cakes rose massively and I almost wish I had made 3 layers instead of two, it certainly would have looked more impressive!

Somebody at work declared it was of the best cakes I had made yet, it was gone in around half an hour but then again cake always makes Monday just that little bit better.

Anyway here's the pictures:

Blackberry & apple crumble cake

So a few weeks ago me and a few others at work picked blackberries in the lane near our office, I therefore ended up with 800g of frozen blackberries so started looking for recipes to use them in! I'll admit, I'm not a huge fan of warm fruit or indeed fruit in cakes but this recipe sounded nice and I thought I'd just make it for the people in my office. I found it on the BBC Good Good website and although the reviews are mixed I didn't find it too difficult to make after a bit of logical re-arranging to the recipe! Anyway, here's the finished product: