THE BEST VANILLA CUPCAKES

If there is one thing I love baking most, it has to be cupcakes! The recipe is super quick to mix up and bake and for something so simple, they taste so lovely.  But it's the decorating part that I love most about making cupcakes to give them that special and personal touch. It’s my go to bake when I want to make something for a special occasion – from birthdays to house warmings and dinner parties, they are an ideal bake! I have found a pretty perfect cupcake recipe (if I say so myself) I am by no means an expert baker but I do get lovely comments on how light they are, which I think is ideal for a decent cupcake. I found the recipe a long time ago and have since adapted it myself! It goes a little bit like this...

You'll need

150g butter
150g caster sugar
3 medium eggs
1 tsp vanilla extract
150g self-raising flour
1/2 tsp baking powder
Cupcake cases

To make the cupcakes 

1. Preheat oven to 180C/Gas Mark 4 and line a 12-hole muffin/cupcake tin with pretty paper cases.
2. Pop the butter, sugar, eggs and vanilla extract into a bowl and then sift in flour and baking powder.

3. Give the mixture a good beat either with or without a hand blender (probs less effort with one!!) Do this for about 2 minutes until it is pale and fluffy to make it taste really light - Almost like a mousse consistency.

4. Spoon the mixture into the cases evenly and bake for around 20-25 minutes.

THE PERSONAL TOUCH - DECORATION 

You'll need

Ready-to-roll icing
Food colouring of your choice
Cookie cutter
Icing sugar
Flower cutters

I love decorating, it’s a time when you can get really creative and messy. Luckily, nowadays, its fairly easy to find contraptions to help you make impressive looking cakes – you don’t need to be an icing expert to get professional results! I bought these daisy push cutters from Lakeland and have used them pretty religiously since. They're simple to use with lovely results!

So, what you need to do...

1. Before you start, mix up a little pot of icing sugar and water, like I'm sure you did as a kid to make cupcakes. This will be used as the 'glue' to keep the icing on the cake.

2. All you need to do is sprinkle a clean, dry surface liberally with icing sugar, so that the icing doesn’t stick and roll out your pre-made icing until it's around 1cm in thickness.
3. Once rolled out, I use a cookie cutter to cut the rounds for the base of the cupcake, as I like the scallop look! Cut out 12 (or as many as you need). 

4. To stick the rounds on the cupcake, wet the back of a spoon with the icing mix you made up earlier and paste directly onto the cupcake. Then stick the icing rounds onto the cake and spread it evenly on the cake.

5. Next up are the pretty little daisies! You can buy pre-made icing in many different colours in supermarkets and specialist stores, but a more economical option is to break off a bit of the white icing, roll it out slightly and adding a drop or two of food colouring. Then I knead it in until the colour is evenly spread. I chose 2 colours - green and orange.

 

6. Using the smallest cutter, cut out 4 little daises per cake. Then turn your spoon upside down and use the edge to dab a tiny bit of the icing sugar mix in four places across the cupcake. Place the flowers over the icing so that they are well stuck down.

7. To make the 'pollen' part of the daisies, take off a tiny bit of icing from a different colour and roll into a tiny ball, placing a dot of icing sugar on the flower and sticking it on.

Et voila! – super simple and very yummy!

Do you like making cupcakes? What decorating do you like doing?