Cupcakes for covid heroes

When Scotland went into lockdown on March 23 2020, who knew it would last over 100 days?  We had no idea who would play such an important role in keeping the country running, and keeping public services ticking over.  

So when I had the chance to bake, decorate and gift some thank you cupcakes to some of our local keyworkers, I was happy to be able to spread joy.  These were loved by the pharmacy team back in May, and the happy spring colours of the personalised toppers made me smile.  What do you think, do happy colours make the food taste better?

Medical cupcakes for a new nurse

A repeat customer, who likes to challenge me, wanted a treat for a friend who had been accepted to study nursing at University.  

I was stumped initially, and she sent over some images for inspiration.  They were great, and I agreed to the order as I had a two-week lead time.  So plenty of time to practice and re-do anything necessary, ha ha.

I made all the decorations in advance, so they would have time to harden.  It would also give me time to re-do them if they didn't work out as I had imagined, or if they cracked while drying.

Then the day before collection I baked up the Classic Vanilla cupcakes as required, so that they were as fresh as possible for the customer's friend.

Once sufficiently cooled they were iced in our signature Classic Vanilla buttercream icing, and the decorations carefully placed on top.  Et voila, gorgeous cupcakes fit for a trainee nurse! Congratulations and enjoy!!

 The last few were a simpler design, but still along the medical theme.

 And a collage view, that I posted to my Facebook page.

Lemon and poppyseed cupcakes

As you may recall, I work as a Teaching Assistant in the Home Economics department of one of our city's high schools - a job I really enjoy (I love baking, almost did my teaching diploma after my Uni degree, and quite like kids too ;) ).  So anyway, one of the classes we're teaching this year involves a food development unit.  The pupils were told to think of an item they could make for sale in a coffee shop that would fit in well with the baked goods already on offer, but be new and different so as to encourage customers to buy it.

They brainstormed for a while, and we chatted about what might work and why.  Then I was tasked with finding a lemon recipe that we could use in class - so it had to be easy enough for the pupils to do themselves, within the right timescale to fit into a period and with ingredients that we could easily purchase.

BBC Good Food to the rescue! I really like the huge range of tried and tested recipes they provide, plus the colours and photography are great.  I find that the recipes usually work for me, so felt confident in looking for one there.  I settled upon their Lemon & Poppyseed cupcakes, and that choice was approved by my teacher - so we were good to go.

It started out well, one pupil in each team making the sponge, the other the icing.  One pupil was alone, so I joined her and we worked together to get the cupcakes into the oven in time.  And the result?  Oh my, they were delicious!!  

The buttercream was lemony and rich, not too sweet or tart, and the sponge was light and fluffy and had just the right amount of lemon zest.  Mmm...

Mixed birthday cupcakes for a man

When it comes to birthday treats for men, well, you need to know if they have a sweet tooth.  See many men prefer crisps to chocolate, and well, that's a whole new ballgame then.  

Luckily this chap was partial to chocolate, and vanilla.  So these mixed classic cupcakes were a doddle, and the blue, green and yellow designs - perfect!

Happy 60th birthday to a great guy...

A giant cupcake way to say thank you

A regular customer of ours, let's call her S, loves loves loves our giant cupcakes.  She's ordered a classic one or two, a sticky toffee pudding one and now a thank you one.  This was for her child's nursery (kindergarten) teachers because he was leaving to go to a different nursery.  I had free reign, and was keen to try out a technique I had seen on Pinterest. It was a novel way to make a shaped top on the cupcake, using a fondant 'snake'.

You crumb-coat the cupcake as you normally would, then roll out a long snake of fondant and wrap it around the top half.  Then you place over your fondant top as you would when covering a cake.  If you click this link, you should hopefully see one of my pins on the topic.  (Have I told you how much I'm loving Pinterest?  It's like having a wall full of post-it notes, but on the computer!  And you can add to it whenver and however much you like! So so fun, and kind of addictive.  Check me out at Pinterest and see what I mean)

Then you roll out enough of another colour of fondant to cover the base, cut it to the size you need (I needed 3" x19" for this particular time) and roll it onto a rolling pin to transport it, then roll it off onto your giant cupcake.  That probably sounds super-confusing, so check the link above to find the photo tutorial.

I have embossed the greeting for two reasons - I really like embossing and I haven't successfully used my alphanumeric cutters/moulds yet.   The whole cake was then sprinkled with a bit of white fairy dust, and we're good to go!

I'm really pleased with the way it turned out, and the feedback from both the customer and the recipients was great!  Hope you do too 

Zebra print for Zoe, part deux

Zoe's mum is similar to me, in that she fully understands that a birthday is the perfect opportunity to go a little crazy and spoil your daughter with cake.  Lucky Zoe had a fabulous cake for her family party, and was having matching cupcakes for her friends party.  

I came across some Wilton Sugar Sheets in zebra print and thought they'd be the perfect match for her theme.  I had purposely kept back some of the purple sugarpaste that I'd used on her cake so that everything would match.

Happy birthday again Zoe!

Caramel, princesses and unicorns for an early birthday treat

Both our girls are quite gregarious, and have lots of friends in their class and outwith school.  But our kitchen table has only 6 chairs, so parties at home are limited in size.  I feel it makes for a more enjoyable occasion, as no-one tends to feel left out when there are only a small group of friends to entertain.  And the girls have certainly never complained, they enjoy the attention too.

In this case, Mini-2 had a group of friends who all lived very near one another and we'd arranged that L was going to come to our house one day after school to play.  But of course, as young kids do, they chatted about it and then G, E, A and K wanted to come too.  Uh, ok sure I said, then racked my brain as to the least stressful way to do that for her...

As her birthday was only a week or so after the planned playdate, we decided to call it an early birthday party and have cake and cupcakes and fun!

Mini-2 chose caramel as her cake flavour, and these super cute picks and cardboard wraps for the table decorations.

We ended up with a 6" cake and a dozen or more cupcakes, so the girls took them home as party favours.

The food boxes match the napkins and cupcake wraps - cute huh?  

Happy early birthday sweet girl.

Blazing out of this place

A last minute order for a leaving-do, from a fire station!  I got the message from L that she needed some cupcakes for a colleague who was leaving the Fire Service and could I help, as she knew we were headed off to Oz very soon.  Sure thing I said, and baked her up some strawberry ripple cupcakes with a dollop of jam (kind of like fire, see?) in the middle, topped with luscious vanilla buttercream and wishes of good luck in flames on top.  Ciao, adios, adieu - enjoy!!

One Direction, every little girls dream

It was that time of year again, D's birthday, and this year she was planning a One Direction themed party. They had so enjoyed the little lilac mini cupcakes from last year that that was the go-to idea for this year.  I started out with the little named decorations and let them dry out overnight.  Then made up dozens of mini cupcakes, all named and some even with the party-guests names on!  Then once they were decorated they were lined up and ready to be eaten.

Happy birthday D - hope it was fabulous!!

 

Sticky toffee pudding cupcakes with salted caramel icing...

I had been invited to the launch party of the Great Pink Bake Off, a charity event in aid of Breakthrough Breast Cancer.  It was to be held in Edinburgh in an early evening on a Thursday.  I thanked the PR lady for inviting me, but explained that as I live and work in Dundee it simply wasn't feasible for me (time and childcare issues basically).  I passed the information on to my colleagues and one was able to attend.  She brought me back a goodie bag, and I set to making these Mark Greenaway Sticky Toffee pudding cupcakes for the adults coming to our tea party (the kids got the personalised mini cupcakes).

As you can see, the recipe was a bit of a palaver, with lots of different little sections to combine.  I hadn't yet made a sticky toffee pudding, despite it being one of my favourite desserts, so I quite enjoyed doing all the necessary parts.

I found making the salted caramel sauce a little tricky.  It seemed to go from white sugar to a dark brown sauce very quickly, and tasted bitter to me.  I asked Mr Becca to try it, and whilst he agreed it tasted good it also seemed burnt/bitter to him.  When making up the icing, the required amount of cream cheese was nowhere near enough for a piping consistency, so I added more cream cheese and far less caramel sauce. Then I felt I had to add in way more icing sugar to make it sweeter.  By the time I'd played about with ingredients to achieve consistency, I ended up having to throw out a fair bit of the caramel sauce...

The end result looked and tasted good though.  The combination of the delicious sponge, with the slightly bitter-sweet icing and drizzled sauce worked really well.  All the adults loved them, and even some of the kids tried them too.  I took the spares in to work the next day, and the colleague who'd been to the launch party and tried the original version deemed them a good copy indeed!  Go Becca  :)

Mini cupcakes for little princesses...

Now that I work whilst The Team are at school/work, it's a bit trickier to organise my time for baking and other fun stuff.  And for more dull stuff, like making packed lunches and getting the kids to after-school activities on time and the like, sigh...  I guess this part is a work in progress, as I hone my time management skills in a new way - that's a positive way to look at things  :)

So for the big batch of mini cupcakes I needed for tomorrow lunchtime, I started on the sugarpaste decorations on Thursday night.  I had spoken to the parents of most the young girls in question, to find out their favourite colours as I had a plan to name and decorate cupcakes in matching colours.  

 

And you can see that The Team got their names in there too, in their favourite colours of green (Mini-1) and pink (Mini-2).  And no, before you ask, I don't have those tiny cute stamps in numbers, despite trying to locate some.

I got the cupcakes baked tonight, and am pleased that nearly all of them turned out well.  But oh boy, I made way too many decorations!  I had bought some cute Disney Princess and Disney Monsters University topper discs too, and didn't have enough cupcakes to use them all - oops.  I'm sure the girls will all be a) super excited to see so many mini cupcakes just for them, and b) to see their names in their favourite colours on said cupcakes.  Roll on tomorrow!

The girls range in age from 2 to 9, they'll all like Disney Princesses, right?

 I mean, who doesn't?

Aww, I just think they're so cute!  Hope the girls do too...

New baby? No problem

I recently bought the cutest little sugarpaste cutters in baby designs, so was thrilled to get a baby shower order.  It was to be girly, but not too pink, and just to say 'Welcome Baby'.  I wanted to try out a new recipe, and went for Nutella cupcakes.  They had Nutella in the sponge, a scooped out section with pure Nutella in the middle, and finally Nutella wound through the rich buttercream icing.  Mmm... chocolate hazelnut overload!

I like that Disney Princess wallpaper - we at Becca Towers fully believe in fairy tales, and doesn't every little girl secretly want to be a princess?

I'm still working on the polka dots.  They went slightly elongated when I rolled them out again.  Do you know how to prevent this?  Please do tell.

Here's a closer look at the supercute baby bottle shape.  There were a few extra cupcakes in the batch, so I made this one especially for a good friend who'd recently had her first baby.  We particularly like the name she chose, as The Team have been watching the Disney Channel's latest hit movie, Teen Beach Movie, and the star is a girl called - you guessed it - Layla.  Although they spell it a little strangely, as Lela.

 Next up is the rocking horse, perfect for wee Ruby.

And finally we have the onesie/babygro shape.  And although everyone thought this was for me, it wasn't! Crazy I know, but there are other women out there who think Rebecca is a marvellous name  ;)
Congratulations to everyone, Prince William and Princess Catherine of the UK, who has just had a baby.  All together now, awwww....

A cake can be the actual birthday gift...

This was a fun request - the cake was to resemble a bow-tied gift box!  It had to be in lilac and cream, where the icing was cream and the bow and any accents in lilac.  there were also to be matching cupcakes and it was for Laura's 21st.  Righto then, off to work.

I had recently seen a few bows done in a different style from that which I had learnt and sort of mastered, and was keen to try one out.  So I asked for a tutorial or some advice from another baker and she pointed me in this direction.  I found it really well written and easy to follow, et voila - I made lots and lots of loops!

Despite adding CMC powder to my sugarpaste so that it would be possible to roll it thinner and have it harden faster, I still made these a few days in advance and probably rolled them a little too thick.  I had been a bit nervous about how I would place and attach them, so did a couple of placement practices.  Until I found that you can't place any more than one layer without something to hold/bind them - oops.  Nevermind, the final run worked out well I think, and I used buttercream and a touch of sugarpaste to hold them in position.  I added the gift tag in last, as it needed to be soft so it could mould to the shape of the finished cake.  Suffice it to say that the customer was thrilled, and I heard back later that the birthday girl had absolutely loved it all.  Result!  Oh, and Happy 21st Birthday Laura   :)

It's not too obvious unfortunately, but some of the cupcakes have cute indentations on them that say 'party time' and 'happy birthday' with balloons.  Perhaps white wasn't the best colour for that?

Teachers deserve treats

In Scotland, school finishes for the academic year this week.  The kids get 6 glorious weeks of holidays, as do their hard-working and often under-appreciated teachers.  Whilst many of us Mums spend the preceding weeks trying to organise childcare or activities to stimulate the children and keep them busy, I felt it was high time the teachers were offered some indulgent treats for end-of-year gifts.  So, have you chosen a Becca Bakes treat for your teacher this year???

Cupcake treats for visiting friends

A lady got in touch recently, saying she had some friends visiting shortly from Australia and would love some cupcakes for afternoon tea.  Ooh, lovely, I said.  We decided upon a mix of vanilla, lemon and sticky toffee and summery colours.  I even managed an attempt at the Southern Cross constellation, or Crux, as it is more correctly known.

(I found out afterwards that they absolutely loved them, and even took photos before they tucked in. Awww, that makes this baker a very happy girl indeed)