Giant cupcake, first & second try

I had been keen to try out a giant cupcake, as I'd seen many other bakers make excellent work of them.  I found a silicon mould, with the help of an old colleague who now runs Cissyface Vintage, at a local The Works store and got to work. 

Unfortunately it doesn't come with a recipe, but rather says to use a box or two of packet mix and blah blah blah.  Well, that wasn't gonna happen at my house, so I tried a full batch of cupcake mix, sprayed the two halves of the mould with oil and went for it.  And boy, what a failure that was!  The mix was short by nearly half so I basically baked a pancake and a rugby ball shape - pretty darn useless.  Tasted good, but no-one wanted odd-shaped bits of cake.  And strangely, it didn't really come out of the mould well at all, despite the spray of oil.

So I emailed a couple of fellow bakers on Facebook who seemed friendly, and they were kind enough to share their cake recipe specifically for giant cupcakes.  I chose one and went for it.  And it worked!  And I even forgot to spray the moulds this time, but it came out almost perfectly (you may notice at the top of the top section, there's a tiny bit that isn't quite right).

I felt like orange for the icing (and neon orange for the glitter), and tried to make it a bit runnier than usual so that it may take the shape of the mould and run down the bottom half slightly.  Well, that had been my plan.  But it didn't quite work out that way...

So I added gold-touched butterflies and the words 'Becca Bakes' and declared us good to go.  The Team loved it, and were very impressed - with the look and the taste.  I found the best way to cut it was to slice up first the top half, then the bottom half.  And it had to be separated into halves to fit into a cake tin for keeping - not the tidiest thing to do, but hey, needs must.

And I'm pleased to say that it got good feedback on Facebook too.  While I'm fully aware that it isn't the best giant cupcake you've ever seen, we don't claim to be the best.  But we do have fun, and make great-tasting cake, so as Meatloaf once said, 'Two outta three ain't bad'.