Lemon-aid and 1001 nights...

Lemon-aid - this is a lemon and white chocolate cheesecake cupcake, and the 'aid' part - they are for the lovely man who helped me solve my 'but I can't upload the software I need onto my new laptop as it hasn't got a CD drive' - he did something like hypnotise it to make it think it has a CD drive...
Here are the cakes...

1001 nights - these are pale pink rose scented cupcakes, with rose scented icing, sprinkled with crystallised rose petals.  Bit of a girlie-fest, for a friend who said they would be a good idea!  Both these and the lemon-aid ones have been iced with a palette knife in the Hummingbird Bakery stylee.

Cupcakes!

It's been a while since I have baked, but it's been ages since I have made cupcakes... Mainly as now having a toddler and a new one on the way means that my time is more limited.  However, events conspired to inspire me to bake cupcakes this weekend and these are the result.  I made some cupcakes for friends and their family, I made some as a gift for our friends who are new parents, and some as a gift for a variety of people having a joint birthday party.  I enjoyed making them and the recipients seemed to enjoy being given them, so a good time had by all.

Rose scented macaroons

I have talked about these before - they are the memory of a friends lovely wedding, and of a day spent in Laduree (!) with friends drinking tea, eating cakes and catching up.  In addition, these are ridiculously easy to make, and are also gluten free! The pink and rose flavour cream are optional, although I personally feel they are essential...

The glass comport was my birthday present from my husband - it is vintage and locally produced and suited us as a piece of social history.  The man we bought it from was also very interesting and was more than happy to discuss the history and the factory, which we found really interesting.  It also happens to look stunning with cakes in it...

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...