A cake to remember

This week I was unbelievably chuffed when a friend from work asked me to make 21 cupcakes for her daughter's 18th party. I was more than happy to oblige, but the pressure was on because I knew they had to be perfect!

She absolutely loved my orange cakes with the roses, so i went for 10 of these, and 11 lemon cakes.

I made these cakes in some pretty purple cases I bought from one of my fave baking supplies shops, Almond Art, made by Foilcraft...let me tell you, I could not recommend them less. They were truly shocking from the moment I took them out of the packaging. Now I don't want this blog post to turn into a moan, but I need somewhere to vent my anger! My orange cupcakes came out beautifully and, as last time I made them, rose to perfection.

Sadly, my cakes were spoilt by these awful cases. The purple colour rubbed off on my hands when I picked them up, the purple bled through to the inside of the case and purple came off into my muffin tray, permanently staining it. I was devastated. But my hands were tied, and I had no other cases at 10pm the night before the cakes were due, and I had to stick with them (I get up for work at 7.30am so I had no choice!). I unwrapped a few cakes, and the purple hadn't rubbed off onto the cakes (thankfully). All I could do was apologise profusely to my friend for the awful, awful cases and hope it didn't put her off my cake. I should have known from the moment I took them out of the packet they would be no good, each case had rubbed the purple colouring onto the one underneath, and I had to forcefully pry each case apart. Needless to say, I will never buy these cases again. I can't fault anything else I've bought from Almond Art, and think it was a problem with the manufacture.

Anyway, apologies, rant over so onwards and upwards!

The lemon cake recipe was as follows (made 12 cupcakes overall):

115g self-raising flour

1/2 tsp baking powder

115g butter

115g caster sugar

2 eggs

Finely grated rind of 1/2 a lemon

2 tbsp milk

• Preheat oven to 180 degrees
• Beat butter and sugar with lemon rind
• Beat in eggs, one at a time, then beat in milk
• Sift flour with baking powder and fold into mixture
• Bake for 15-20 mins until golden brown

Nice and simple!

I piped swirls of lemon flavour buttercream, coloured with 2 teaspoons yellow food colouring, (shoved it all in the bowl and mixed until it looked right as usual!), and sprinkled with hundreds and thousands. I also cut out blue fondant butterflies as toppers.

For the last cake, I cut out a white fondant circle, and wrote an 18 on the top using a food colouring pen, iced with Sainsbury's glitter writing icing, and finished off with pink glitter sprinkles. This cake was to sit at the top of a cupcake tree.

Here's the lemon, all boxed up and ready to go.

And three of the orange cakes with roses, and the special 18 cupcake.

Both mum and daughter seemed really happy with them. The party is tonight so I will await feedback on Tuesday, and hope they were as chuffed as they looked when I handed the cakes over!