I'm back! With gardening cupcakes and a new kitchen addition...

Oh dear. I'm very aware it's been over a month (!) since my last post; quite shameful. Unfortunately I seem to have had a run of bad news, and blogging has fallen by the wayside.

However I'm back to try and redeem myself, and to share some of my latest cakes. These were garden/gardening themed cupcakes in honour of someone very special to me, and they are just oh so cute. There was sadly one or two casualties with my toppers (sunflower petals and carrot leaves falling off), but I was really pleased with the ones that made it.

Here is a picture of some of the toppers halfway through progress...

The spades were the hardest to make, and to get the silver 'metal' half to stick to the brown 'wooden' half. I also would have preferred a lighter silver colour for them, but this glittery grey was all I could get my hands on. I still love them.

My favourites were the sunflowers; sunflowers hold a lot of happy childhood memories for me, and these toppers were so easy to make, yet so pretty.

I wish my bad photography did them justice! I used a small PME daisy plunger cutter, and cut flowers from yellow fondant, then coloured the remaining yellow with a tiny bit of orange colouring paste, then cut flowers from that. I layered the orange tinted flowers with the yellow on top. Then just a tiny dark brown circle for the centre, which I pricked with a cocktail stick several times to give the impression of the sunflower seeds. 

The finished cupcake looked lovely.

For some reason I can't get my photo of the full lot of finished cupcakes to load, but here's a few individuals. There were also tiny apples and pears...

And mini carrots...

Alongside the roses and the spades.

I also seem to have a constant gripe with cupcake/muffin cases. First it was the foil case catastrophe. These latest ones I tried out seemed to sort of...stretch out when I took them out of the packet and put them in the muffin tray. Instead of neatly sitting in the muffin tray, then seemed to expand, and the creases unfold of their own accord. It was really irritating because when I then went on the pour the cake mixture in, the cases folded in on themselves - not a good look, difficult to pipe on the top of the cupcake, and leaves a funny shape. Please someone recommend some good muffin cases!

And lastly I have a happy new addition to my kitchen, which I am really loving so far...

It's a lovely little Kenwood mixer. Now I know it's no Kitchen Aid, but there is an economic downturn don't you know! 

I promise to try not to leave it so long between posts next time :)

Heavenly Vanilla Bean Cupcakes

So it's been about two weeks since I blogged last, and my aim was to blog at least once a week, so I've missed the boat on that one already! That means it's also been about two weeks since I baked any cakes, and I swear even my oven was beginning to give me dirty looks, let alone my cake-starved friends...

What I have done in the last two weeks is use Astral's great tips over at her blog The Art of Being Perfect, and make myself up some vanilla sugar. Here it is:

Not much to look at, but the smell when I open the jar is fantastic. The vanilla pods are buried inside the sugar, I promise.

And the cakes I decided to bake, now I have my vanilla sugar, were also from Astral's recipe.

I hold my hands up and admit, I have never used vanilla bean paste before, only extract, and the effect that this had on my cakes was phenomenal. From the cute little specks of the bean in the mixture to...oh yes, the taste. Say hello, because my inner domestic goddess has arrived!

This was the last of the mixture, I just remembered to photograph it before I used it all up. 

I would like to say a massive thank you to Astral for introducing me to the best vanilla cupcake recipe ever. And I've been around the vanilla cupcake block a few times. These were mouthful of light, fluffy, vanillary heaven (is vanillary even a real word? Who cares!) I actually managed to get a generous 14 cupcakes out of this mixture.

The vanilla buttercream was equally as divine, lusciously thick and creamy as promised. My icing spirals didn't pipe great, but practise makes perfect, so hopefully one day they will be! 

This is definitely a recipe I would love to use time and time again; simple, yet delicious, so a huge thank you again to Astral for sharing it.

For the decoration, I took inspiration from a cake I saw on my new favourite TV programme, Cake Boss, and went for gambling/casino themed cupcakes. I made cubes and circles out of fondant icing, drew the numbers of the dice on the white cubes with a black food colouring pen, and attempted to make poker chips. I borrowed the design for the chips from an poker kit I've got here at home. They weren't perfect, but they looked pretty cute, and I was pleased with them.

Let's wait and see what my chums at work think of them tomorrow!