decorating Archives - Mummy's Little StarsMummy's Little Stars

Last weekend I met up with 8 other Plymouth bloggers at Mrs Brown’s, a local bakery and decided to do a vintage cupcake masterclass. I’ve always loved making cupcakes, although finding less time as the children get older and more demanding of my time. I’m a huge buttercream fan and tend to stick to this as is easy to work with and tastes delicious so it was interesting to work with other types icing and learn how to create different effects. I certainly picked up a few tips that I’ll be putting into practice the next time I bake. Can you believe I decorated all the cakes below with my own fair hands!

First off we learnt how to make an edible rose decoration. Would you believe that you start with 11 little balls of icing and by using your fingers to flatten and mould they become petals which in turn become a finished rose. Spray on a bit of silver lustre, add a sprinkling of pearlised balls and voila, my cake is done!

We then tried some other ideas before stopping for a break and trying a piece of a rather huge Victoria sponge cake, covered in chocolate coated strawberries, that Georgie (owner of Mrs Brown’s) had made for us. We then went back to our decorating class before boxing up our four creations ready to take home.

Here we are showing off our handiwork:

It was a great way to spend a couple of hours and I couldn’t wait to get home and see what the children thought. I think the pictures below show you of their approval for mummy’s cakes!!

Going to the cupcake class really reignited my love of baking and although I have a hectic few months ahead, I do hope to try out some new things and bake more regularly in the future!

Miss M loves baking so with an excess of eggs in the house I decided to let her make some cupcakes this weekend. We were also short on cocoa powder but having loads of drinking chocolate in the house we decided to substitute that in our recipe instead of cocoa powder.

For 12 small cupcakes we used:

4oz self raising flour
4oz castor sugar
4oz margarine or butter
1 heaped tablespoon drinking chocolate
2 eggs
2 tablespoons of milk

Icing sugar, food colouring and decorations to finish

1. Cream margarine and sugar in a bowl
2. Add eggs slowly with flour/drinking chocolate and milk until all combined
3. Put in oven at 180 degrees for approx 20-30 mins
4. For icing mix icing sugar with boiling water and add relevant colourings.
5. Decorate to your hearts content!

Miss M loves baking and got completely stuck in mixing the ingredients, cracking the eggs and pouring in the flour. Mister B sat on the sideline eagerly awaiting the finished result! They had barely been out of the oven for 5 minutes when Miss M wanted to ice them but we let them cool down a little more before I made her up two bowls of icing, one pink and one blue (on her request of course!). I gave her full creative control about the designs and left her to come up with her iced masterpieces!!

As you can see Mister B remained chilled out while his sister did all the hard work. They both couldn’t wait to pick a cake and tuck in although poor Mister B was under strict instruction from big sister as to which cake he was allowed to choose. These cakes did have a moist hot chocolatey taste them and my two described them as “Mmmm yummy”!!