Strawberry and Vanilla Cupcakes- Luke's Nanna's 70th

Good evening guys,

I have had such a busy weekend work wise. I have two assignments due next Friday and a lot of work to do on my dissertation but I got up early Saturday and still managed to fit in some BAKING :).

This blog was originally going to be about the Blackforest Gâteaux that you can see on the gallery page but I'm going to leave that til next time. And instead blog about the cupcakes I made this weekend :D. 

It was Luke's (the boyfriend) Grandma's (Nanna as he say's it) 70th which gave me the perfect opportunity to make some girlie pretty cupcakes. I again decided to follow the spring theme and with the weather this weekend they seem really appropriate.

I used some pretty pink and blue spotty buncases and managed to get 12 cupcakes out of the typical vanilla bun mix. If you want to give these buns a go check out the SUNFLOWER BUNS page for the basic cake recipe.  I then made some pink buttercream using the buttercream recipe also on the SUNFLOWER BUNS  page but added pink food colouring instead of yellow:

Pink Food Colouring

(I find Silver spoon works best for pink icing)

Before I applied the butter cream, I used a sharp knife to cut small dome shaped pieces out of the top of the cupcakes so that I could fill them with jam. I put a teaspoon of Tesco's own strawberry jam in each cupcake before using a typical star nozzle (the larger one) that comes with most icing syringes to apply vanilla buttercream to the top of each cake, over the jam. If you want a good icing syringe I would see what's on Ebay as I inherited mine from my Mum and Dad bought me some for Christmas. Lucy did get one from Poundland so that might be worth a try?

For the decoration (the best bit other than licking to bowl) I used yummy Mini Eggs on most of the cakes and blue icing flowers from Morrisons on  3:

Mini eggs

Blue Icing Flowers.

I then went a bit mad on the sprinkles and added two different types:

Hundreds and Thousands from Morrisons

Pink Sugar Strands (one of my leaving presents from work last year)

Followed by glitter and sparkles! I bought these two of Ebay and I swear by Rainbow Dust in Hologram White as a finishing touch to most of my cupcakes :

Rainbow Dust - Hologram White

Magic Sparkles

I then used my letter and number cutters to cut out 'Anne' '70'  and added them to the cupcakes with the blue flowers. (I've added the link to the letter cutters I bought from Amazon, I only paid £7.50 though so I am sure you can find them cheaper).

With that my cupcakes were complete :) Voila here are the finished products:

Single Cupcake

Anne's cupcakes

And that's it! :) As you can see i've tried to include for pictures in this blog and have been using Bibbycam for Blackberry to make them look all pretty. (I do recommend this app for Blackberry users).

On another note I have ordered some St Patrick's Day cupcake toppers so if I get round to baking this week, these may appear on my blog before the Black Forest Gâteaux but we shall see :)

Until next time lovelys, 

Samantha Who (loves to bake)