Mmm, cake

It’s National Cupcake Week! Of course, the girls and myself couldn’t let it pass us by without baking some cupcakes to enjoy. I used a recipe from the cupcake book they chose for me for my birthday for the cake, and totally cheated with icing-in-a-tub.

Lydia helped me mix the sponge while Georgie was at school. The recipe uses cocoa powder and vanilla extract and tasted great. They rose nicely and I left them to cool while we went to pick Georgie up.

While Lydia was napping, Georgie helped me to decorate the cakes. I added pink colouring to the vanilla icing and piped it onto the cakes, so that Georgie could decorate them with sprinkles, sugar butterflies and mini sugar coated chocolate balls. The cakes were topped with some little paper owls and both Georgie and Lydia (once she’d woken up!) were delighted with their joint creations.

Georgie and Lydia love to spend time in the kitchen with me baking, and it makes them so happy to be able to don their aprons and join in the fun. It’s a simple, inexpensive, activity to do with them – with delicious, if somewhat oddly decorated at times, results.

Also – if you have any icing and sprinkles left, here is my tip to use that up and keep your child smiling a little longer. Grab some biscuits (we used rich teas) and spread the last of the icing on them, then let them go wild with whatever decorations they have left over.

I usually decant a decent amount of each type of sprinkles into spare cake cases before we start, so they can’t use up whole tubs in one sitting. This is a great way of using up whatever is left in those cases at the end of our baking sessions.

This is the book I used for the sponge recipe: