Birthday mini-cupcakes

These were baked as a birthday gift for a friend. Vanilla cupcakes with yellow vanilla icing, birthday letter candles and some small sugar flowers.

Staycation Mini-Cupcakes

It's 11am, it's coffee time at work - an social tradition of which the days are now numbered in its present daily form. However, one thing is guaranteed, that the number in attendance will increase exponentially when the work 'cake' is included in the invite. The unwritten rule, is that people are welcome to contribute offerings to share to celebrate birthdays, work anniversaries, holidays, retirement, moving on, moving up, pregnancy (announcement and return), and the welcome of new colleagues, or visitors, plus any other excuses that can be thought of to share biscuits, cakes and dodgy produce from foreign climes.

However, these mini-cupcakes were my contribution from our August staycation. The choices were vanilla cupcakes iced with pink icing and appropriate decorative accessories, chocolate cupckes with chocolate icing, and iced fancies which I made on a whim from the surplus of chocolate cake mixture.

Macaroons

These were made to remind me of a friends wedding from last year (and bizarrely I made them on the day of their Wedding Anniversary - although it's a shame they lived too far away to share...). However, they had a large pyramid of the very stylish macaroons from the creme de la creme of macaroon patissiers, Laduree. We had to leave before the pyramid was dis-assembled, however, this gave us the perfect excuse for breakfast and macaroons (and a host of other purchases) in the Laduree concession at the well known large department store in Knightsbridge.

These ones were shared between friends who we went to for dinner, ourselves and my parents. The macaroons were plain almond, but filled with a mixture of double cream and raspberry jam, and I although they were delicious, next time I have a hankering to mix some drops of rosewater in with the mix...

Traditional Maderia Cake

This is a traditional Maderia cake (Nigella's recipe) made as a birthday cake for my Uncle for a significant birthday! It was just trimmed with a ribbon to liven it up a bit. The recipe was nice and easy, although I increased the quantities by a third to make the cake a bit bigger...

Ruby Wedding Cupcakes

A dozen cupcakes made for a family Ruby Wedding celebration. The cakes are Red Velvet - a variation on chocolate cake dyed red either with beetroot (which does go very well with chocolate - which I first experienced thanks to a friends recipe), or in the abscence of beetroot, with red food colouring. They are iced with a cream cheese icing mixture and topped with real ruby rose petals.