This was the Victoria sponge I made to smuggle into the National Trust property we were visiting at the weekend where they had a Dickensian Christmas. This mainly involved old people dressed up in Victorian costumes in Wimpole Hall and us shuffling round small rooms - they didn't open the kitchen, why?! - whilst the children did olden days' activities. We were saving ourselves for a cup of tea at the end of our race round the house - now carrying lavender bags and with smuggled cake (much cheaper than the ones they have) - but they wanted to close the tea rooms so the tea, which was luke warm by now, was served by a very grumpy - possibly very authentic - old lady in the outside cafe and there were no hot chocolates for the children so they had diet Pepsi. The cake was bloomin lovely though so that saved the day (if I say so myself).

This is a box of cakes I made for a bake sale at the Indigo cafe in Cambridge. It is the teeniest cafe in the world (well, the teeniest one I've ever been into) with lovely food and coffees and very sweet, friendly staff. We took them to the cafe at about 4pm and I went with my 9 year old daughter, her friend who's 7 and the daughter of one of my partner's friends who is 5. I haven't been into town with 3 smalls for a long time and doing it in the dark on a Saturday was an experience :)) So we handed them over proudly and went on a brief walk through town, which was insanely busy, and made our escape back home to the warm.

Here are some cakes I made for a student the other day - she had seen a cake I'd done with the 'Love' sign on and luckily I had a few left! I can't remember what website I got it from so I'll have to search for it in time for Valentine's day (I know it's a way off but with cupcake sprinkles or decorations it pays to be prepared...)

Two pictures of a recent cake order for a lovely pregnant lady for her child's birthday. She ordered 25 cakes - enough for all the children in the class at nursery - and, I have to say I was pretty pleased with the way they look! The first one is a bit blurry which is because I took these photos at around 6am after making and decorating them and I really can't focus at that time in the morning.

I always wake up at around 5am on 'market stall morning' and it takes me at least an hour to get into gear - I draw a plan of how I'm going to decorate the cakes the night before as I know I won't be able to think in the morning - and I can't even drink a cup of tea for about the first half an hour. (this is momentous, or momentus can't spell, news as tea is usually the very first thing I think about when I wake up).

The dad was sent to pick up the cakes and there is always something very endearing about men carrying cupcakes. They do it in a manner which aims to suggest that they are still all man and could knock down a tree or wrestle a bear with their teeth should the need arise, they just happen to be carrying cupcakes..

Here is a gorgeous chocolate cake for a lucky Grandpa! I had to look at the text ordering the cake to check if 'grandpa' had a 'd' and indeed it does. This is the fourth cake that I have made for this particular family (which I hope is a good sign..). The mum of the family was my first customer at 8.30am on my first day on the market whilst I was still unloading all the cakes! She was walking through town with her two daughters and happened upon the daisycakes experience and the rest is history. They always request the same cake, which is Nigella's chocolate cake, with chocolate icing and I hope I get to carry on working my way through the family through the relatives :)

Well, I still can't work out how to transfer photos from my phone to the laptop which means, frustratingly, having to wait until a willing (and they usually aren't) teenager or my partner are around to do it for me. I have to learn. But luckily I have a few photos that were downloaded earlier.

Yesterday on the stall was great although it is now freezing and the challenge is wearing enough clothes but still being able to move. Another way is to eat a lot and drink endless cups of tea. I had the world's biggest baked potato yesterday with at least a pound of cheese and a whole tin of baked beans from a neighbouring stall. It was delicious! The cupcakes sold really well, especially the ones with Hello Kitty marshmallows on. They are soo popular the main problem is finding the Hello Kitty stuff in the first place. Chinatown in Soho is a good place to start.

Well, that's all for this one. Once I get the photos from this week done for me (the shame) I'll post them here :))

It's an 'It's Tuesday' cupcake! I've spent all today making cakes for the stall tomorrow including my first attempt at a triple layer red velvet layer cake. It looks fantastic and I am soo pleased with it but I can't seem to take a good photo with my phone (which is what I usually use) so I'm going to wait for Daisy (my 15 year old daughter) to take some for me with her flash new phone. I have also made 2 lemon and polenta - they aren't at all photogenic but taste delicious - a large and a small carrot cake, 2 lemon drizzle cakes as well as chocolate cupcakes.

I was just about to make beetroot brownies, using the beetroot we get from the organic veg stall on the market on Sundays when I remembered I hadn't cooked the beetroot aaarghh!! It takes ages to boil them before you can grate them and add to the melted choc and butter, so they are now bubbling away like something in a witch's cauldron with their horrible ratty tails...

I will get photos of the red velvet cake and up/download them whichever one of those is the appropriate term :))

The one of the large cake didn't work so here are some I made earlier :) This is halloween green icing used for good..

Here are a few of the halloween cakes! The one at the bottom was supposed to be a ghost but looks more like a tadpole or a tadpoltegeist as someone suggested :))

I also did a huge square cake for twin 10 year old girls which looks cool - I hope it tasted nice too. The thing with cupcakes is that you can taste one of the batch to check it's ok but with a larger cake you just have to hope for the best.

Talking of larger cakes, tomorrow I'm making a huge triple layer red velvet cake (from the Hummingbird bakery cookbook) which I cannot wait to do! We went to the bakery in South Kensington and bought one of their cupcakes to share. It was gorgeous with a huge chocolatey swirl on top. We sat on Hyde park to eat it between 3 of us! So here is a picture of Sofia and Claudia's cake and a half eaten Hummingbird bakery extravaganza..

I've been doing a Saturday stall for the last few weeks but I think I'm going to stick to just doing a Wednesday at the moment. Saturday doesn't seem to be cake day, people are too busy shopping in Topshop or Boots which, of course, is fair enough but doesn't help me in my quest to save up for a Merc - I have around 73 pence so far. This week I did a few halloween cakes which were great fun to decorate - I used jelly teeth and then drew in the faces around them or wrote my favourite 'i'm scared' words such as 'gulp' or 'eek'.

Here are a few pictures of cakes from this week's stall. I did a large carrot cake for a little girl's first birthday and they wanted a gothic, purpley colour scheme so that's what I did. It's the wrong way up but is supposed to be a tree with flowers in night time colours around it!

I just had to put this one on too as it's soo cool!

This is a gorgeous apple cake called 'Felix's apple cake' which is my eldest son's name (well, he's called Felix not Felix's apple cake). I made it with apples from our garden which made me feel very homey, like a 40s housewife in a Janet and Alan Allberg book.

I did my first Saturday stall and, as predicted, it was bloomin scary. I was so lucky to start where I did on the market next to lovely Brigitte and Michael and it just wasn't the same in my new spot. I do have very funny Horse the German sausage man next to me (he may well be called Horst according to my friend Heidi but it sounds like Horse to me) - he speaks just like Arnie - but he is too busy to talk as no-one, and I would include myself if I ate meat or he did veggie sausages, can walk past a stall with a hunky man selling hot salty food on a cold day without buying some. He, hilariously, buys rolls which are at least half the size of his sausages so they stick out either end and look like something you would see in the Beano but no-one seems to mind as they walk off wolfing them down. That's on my right and on the left is the earnest and knowledgeable record seller who recreates the film 'High Fidelity' in front of your very eyes. He gets a lotta nerds on that stall who have searched for the New Seekers first edition of something printed only once in 1969 by 'insert obscure record label name' and he brings them real joy by finding what they're looking for. Should say just for legal purposes that he also gets normal people buying records but I was looking away when they were there :) I also nearly froze to death, didn't go to the loo for 5 hours (after 2 Americanos, half a flask of tea and a bottle of sparkly water) and ate at least 3 slices of my own cakes when the little rush had subsided but that's another story..

Beautiful coffee cakes for a lucky person's birthday on Friday :)

I had a couple left over so I put a creamy topping with grated chocolate on which look fab (I think!)

Lemony cupcakes from last week. I'm doing my first Saturday stall this week which I am equally excited and scared about. I'm in a different spot on the market not with my usual little gang. I'm going to be next a sausage stall which could be a mixed blessing. In one way at least I'll get hungry people passing by, but it will smell of sausages oh dear. But cupcakes make a good pudding after a big German sausage or at least that's what I'll tell people :))

I'm doing lots of big cakes on the stall now and this is one of them! I'm also working on autumn recipes for cupcakes and tried apple today but they didn't quite work out and sunk in the middle. I tried adding a spoonful of homemade apple butter in some of the cases and then stirring it in to the sponge mixture but it didn't work very well in either case. Perhaps it was my apple butter which was sort of a made up recipe from all the hundreds on the web. Some say do add butter, some say don't, some say use cider so in the end I used a very old recipe by Marguerite Patten but halved the sugar. All very complicated and I'm sure I'm over complicating it..

I also made these 2 pretty cakes this week for 24 year old twins - I think they look lovely in the bags with ribbon. 
These were cakes I did for a 13 year old's birthday. She didn't want any writing on the cakes but just a range of pastel colours and some pretty flowers. The sponges were all chocolate apart from one gluten free cake which I made for her sister and put in a separate bag tied with a ribbon. I was really pleased with the way the way they looked and I put them on the stall so that people could see them whilst I was waiting for the birthday girl's dad to come and pick them up! 

This was a cake I did this weekend for a little girl's birthday. I should have done the writing in red really to fit in with the colour scheme but it seems ok with the blue. This cake is chocolate underneath with a chocolate filling which is very yummy. The cupcakes below were done for a coffee morning and then I made a couple of extra ones for my daughters. I've made a carrot cake, a madeira cake and a lemon drizzle cake for the stall tomorrow and I'm going to do Hummingbird cake for Wednesday. I'll take some photos of those cakes too but the cupcakes seem to be more glamorous and lend themselves to photo taking more naturally :))

These look so good! I put raspberry jam in some of them, pureed strawberries in others and the rest were vanilla. I really enjoy making and decorating these. As I said in a previous post I'm still searching for the perfect listening to go with icing a cupcake (so far in the top 10 Woman's Hour, Meatloaf singing Bat out of Hell, Leona Lewis or Count Arthur Strong - although when I listen to him I shake because I'm laughing) and I'll put together a definitive list. I have to say that as I am a old lady, Radio 2 and 4 will feature pretty heavily...

These are a few of the 30 cupcakes I did for Cambridge University Press this week - the strawberry ones looked really good although there is a bit of juice from the strawberries on them. It didn't seem to stop anyone's enjoyment of them though I'm pleased to say :) 

This is how they look in the box tied with a ribbon and I delivered them to Emily who was very happy with them :) 

I also made these today for an 18th birthday party. I really like the colours together. I also put them in my new boxes which are much nicer than the old ones as you can see the cakes within! The first thing people want to do when you arrive with cakes is have a look at them - naturally - so it's great having them on display like this and they look really pretty. I need to do some boys' ones too though! 
I'm not sure what the best thing to listen to whilsts decorating cupcakes is but Barry Manilow on Desert Island Discs has got to be up there. That's what I was listening to whilst making this little box of cakes for a man to give to his girlfriend. First of all he wanted 2 strawberry ones and the 'happy birthday' ones but then decided on one big owl and one little owl. I have no idea why but I think they look adorable and I hope she likes them! I said if they were really effective then I would do his wedding cupcakes :))

I tried out some of these cupcakes on the stall this Wednesday. I have to think about what I'm going to write the night before as I can't think of anything when I'm decorating them at 5am! So if I have it written down then I can do it on automatic pilot. I really like the look of these with the glitter and hand piped flowers. 

I'm making a Happy Autumn cake this week for an American student who has just started at university in Cambridge. They want lovely autumnal colours and I'm really looking forward to decorating it! I'll put a photo on here when it's done.  

The photo on the right should have said 'Lyndsey' but I'd run out of the letter y in my sugarcraft set so had to do 'Lindsev' and the one on the left is from a set I made for the children. Maddie is my youngest and one of the most willing taste testers :)

Here are few more pictures of cakes I've done recently - I thought I should make an effort and put them on the blog as website technology seems to be beyond me! The cupcakes with the red flowers on were the ones we took to the 'CherryBake' competition in Borough Market. It was an opportunity for people to make things using English cherries. I made a quick cherry jam and stirred it into the sponge mixture and then put fresh cherries on top of four of them (we took 12 in total) and wrote 'cherry good cupcakes on the middle four' :) I took my daughters and we had a wonderful day out, we tasted lots of different things from the stalls and came home laden down with olives and cheese. The winner was a lady also from Cambridge who had made a gorgeous cherry tart. 

This is a larger version of the photo below as I couldn't work out how to make that one bigger! These were for a little girl's first birthday. 

Here are a couple of cakes for birthdays that I've done recently. One for a one year old and the other for a 21st birthday (both for girls!) 

I'm going to start having my market stall 2 days a week from this week (so of course I should really now be cooking but am frozen in panic and delaying by typing this). This means I'll have to think of exciting cupcake designs twice a week eek! I'm also going to have to get up twice at 5am which is a tragically small number of days compared to my partner - he has to get up every day in the week at 5 - but he doesn't have the hair issues I do. So hair will have to be done the night before and then I can face the public by 8.30. 

The only trouble is I've been doing the market during the school holidays so far whereas now I'll have to do it in the midst of packed lunch preparation, school uniform mishaps and the general air of chaos that 2 daughters create (sons don't seem to be so much trouble - they just eat, mumble and go). 

I bought some beautiful Hello Kitty rings from America which arrived last week so i'm definitely going to use those, maybe some cherry ones and then... my mind's a blank. The picture is of an oreo cupcake with a Hello Kitty marshmallow. It's 10am now and I have until 3 to make 100 cupcakes so off I go..

Just thinking which cupcakes to do for Wednesday's market. Sometimes the best thing is not to look at all the ideas of the internet because you quickly go mad trying to do all of them. So I have to decide about 6 designs I think which will draw people in by looking fabulous :) and will taste good too. So far the favourite flavours are vanilla, chocolate and lemon but I'm going to do Oreo ones this week as they are usually very popular. I'm also going to make Nigella's malted chocolate cake which she's decorates with maltesers. I'll take a photo and post it to see how it turns out. So so far this week the plan is to do:

Hello Ducky cupcakes

Strawberry pink glitter cupcakes

Baby ballerinas

Hello Kitty cupcakes 

And then I'll have to think of one sensible one as these are all a bit kitsch! 

I've been on the market again! (Does that sound wrong, like I'm newly single and looking for love -  I mean my market stall of course). This time it was baking hot so we went with slightly heavy hearts thinking that it was not exactly cake weather. It was a slow start and I sat (with boyfriend Matt) trying to look cheery as people walked straight past the stall without even looking boo hoo. But things gradually picked up as town got busier and we still managed to sell 60 cupcakes and 1 big cake hooray.. The worst problem was the wasps which meant that we had to cover the cakes with a huge net type arrangement meaning noone could see the cakes aargh. So we took it off and spent the day swatting them with a tea towel and coaxing them into a jar of honey. 

I just love the atmosphere of being on the market. Brigitte - my neighbour stall holder and I - kept the divider between us down so that we could see each other and consequently chat all day. And her resistance to my cakes proved futile as she bought one for herself, husband and daughter..

I've also been on a cupcake decorating course with Michelle from the Lavender Bakery. It was fabulous! We went for a day out first and I dragged partner and youngest daughter to Jane Asher's cake shop (we got sprinkles and beautiful gold ballet dancers for putting on top of the cakes) and then walked around South Ken. It is without doubt the poshest and richest place I have ever walked around. We looked in the estate windows - houses at £6 and a half mill eek - and went into a shop selling little things for children's rooms. A cushion with a punk design on, roughly the size of an A4 piece of paper, was £135!! We slunk out trying to look as if we had enough money but were not in the market for sex pistol memorabilia. Anyway, then I set off to Islington the Make Lounge and partner and daughter met a friend in a cafe. 

The course was great. There was wine, tea and coffee - as you can imagine with a room full of women of a certain age no-one chose tea or coffee, we all knocked back the Pinot G - and just a lovely friendly atmosphere. We started by making piping bags - I was hopeless and used the ones Michelle had rolled on her way in the cab! Then we practised piping and finally were let loose on 7 cupcakes each and used her delicious meringue buttercream icing to cover them and then piped on our own designs in thinned down royal icing. I wrote the children's names and then did some hearts. I'd cut the hole at the top of the piping too big so my writing came out wavy and wrong so I kept it quiet that I actually had my own (little) business selling cakes. 

With part of teeny profit I've bought a swimming costume to try and remove a little of the cupcake blubber that I'm now carrying. It's orange and brown which I thought would detract the eye from the body inside :)

After many months of planning, I finally did my first day on the market in Cambridge. This is very exciting partly because I love being outdoors and having the opportunity to bring my cakes to a bigger market (pun haha) and partly because Cambridge has almost NO independent shops - we are swamped by Next, Starbucks and Marks and Sparks, even our John Lewis is duller than most - so having a stall on the market is a chance to be part of the only little range of shops that sells a randrom collection of things made by the individuals. 

I got up at quarter to five eek!! with rain pouring down and decorated the 50 cupcakes I'd made the day before, packed them in boxes, drank 2 cups of tea, panicked, looked at my hair and decided to give it up as a bad job, made a flask of tea and then woke up my partner and 2 daughters (I have 2 sons too but they weren't there). Partner so he could take me and little cake babies to the market and daughters so they could be excited with me and wave in their pyjamas (my older daughter is 15 so she can look after the littler one). Then we set off and got to the market by 8.30am wow! Normally during the school holidays our optimum time for being ready is around midday so 8.30 is very impressive but I was running on adrenalin and may never be there that early again. 
We set up in the damp and rain - still though with the adrenalin and excitement I hardly noticed. I met the 2 stall holders next to me - hello Brigitte and Micheal! - and took my first order for a birthday cake by 8.45am from a woman walking past with her children. Then my friend Martin came past with his immaculately presented dog (who I fed a piece of lemon and polenta cake) and then that was it, I was on my own as Matt (my partner) had rushed back to get the plastic food container which had all our change in for the day and which we'd completely forgotten. 

And it was the best day! We had loads of visitors, Daisy (my 15 year old) came and worked with me on the stall and helped me during the rush to put cupcakes carefully in boxes and do the adding up - apparently 8 x £1.50 is beyond me - and she tied polka dot ribbons round the boxes,I always end up with the bow on the bottom. People are cheered up by cupcakes and we had ones with ducks, Hello Kitty, messages saying 'nice buns' and 'I love you' and so you always get a conversation going and a nice atmosphere around the stall (this was my first central market but I'd done a few other fairs).  We sold out by 3pm and I can't wait for next week. This time my youngest daugher Maddie will be helping me and has been promised the noodles and spring rolls that Daisy and I got from the stall behind us for lunch and that this time she can be my special helper.  So, if you are in the area please come by and see us! Over the next weeks I'll post recipes and pictures as I gradually get to grips with modern technology :))