Homemade Recipes!

Baking Birthday Cupcakes!

It was my dad's birthday a while ago on June 17th, but his party is not until this weekend as him and my mum went away on holiday straight afterwards. My mum is doing a little buffet for it, and so I volunteered to make some cakes and decorate them for it. 

I cheated slightly with the first lot, by buying some pre-made fairy buns and icing them with plain white icing and jellybeans/ sprinkles. This is mainly because they are for the little children coming, and they don't really appreciate intricately decorated or well made cakes!

For the rest of the guests though I spent a bit more time and effort. I made some cake mixture using the standard recipe that I always use: 2 medium eggs, 4oz self raising flour, 4oz butter, 4oz sugar and 2 teaspoons of vanilla essence. This makes around 15 large cupcakes, or 20 smaller ones, depending on your appetite!

I wanted to use a Leeds United theme for the decoration (my dad is a die-hard fan!) so I also added some blue food colouring to the cake mixture to create royal blue cupcakes. They take just over twelve minutes to cook in a fan oven on 180 degrees depending on the depth and size of them. Once cooled, I made some butter-cream using margarine and icing sugar, coloured it yellow, and piped it onto the top of the cakes using my piping instrument which is a god send and so easy to use. Before the icing set I added little white balls onto the top of the cakes, completing the blue, yellow and white Leeds colour scheme. I don't think it will be very obvious until I tell people, but subtlety is always a good thing I find!