I really love cupcakes and I love doing the decorations but sometimes only a Victoria sandwich will do - it is still my favourite cake. Just lovely vanilla sponge with jam, strawberries and cream for the filling and a cup of tea and that is the afternoon sorted.. I made this one last Thursday when I pick up my daughter and 3 other children from school (and one extra this week) and one of the little girls will not eat any fruit at all so I put choc spread in. They devoured two slices each in about 3 seconds flat and I had to fight them off to save a bit for my partner who always comes in from work hoping that there will be a little bit of a cake left for him :)

These are some cakes from the stall on Wednesday - the ones in the box are for an office where they have a 'cake club' which must make it a great place to work (if I say myself with my cakes!). I think they look pretty good in the box anyway but it's the ribbon that really finishes it off. And there's a new ribbon shop opening in Cambridge opposite the Jamie Oliver restaurant. I love ribbon - I think it looks lovely in little girls' hair but you have to do it before they're 3 or they resist - and it's so difficult to find. I bulk buy when I'm staying with a friend in Devon (still the sort of place that you can buy ribbon and crocheted things at the indoor market) or I get some in John Lewis but their selection is limited so it'll be great to have a whole shop! Well, it does sell material too but I'm concentrating on the ribbon..

The other cakes are in some gorgeous pink polka dot cupcake cases I bought last week and the cake flavour is coconut and mango - a taste of sunshine in the gloom.

I love these cakes! These are part of an order of 30 I did for a girl's birthday and she asked me just to do a range of flavours and colours and I'm really pleased with the way they look. It's really easy with the pink colouring to go a bit over the top - as I've done here! - but then you realise that the calpol pink looks pretty good with blue flower :)

I also love the white swirls with mini chocolate buttons and the white chocolate star decorations. In fact they all look pretty good...

I did my cake decorating classes the other day and they went quite well. There were a few too many children and I realised very early that, if you should ever teach a class of children how to make cakes, it is better to have the buttercream made beforehand rather than to make each bowlful at a time as impatient children gather at your side waiting for theirs. But they all went off with a plateful of crazy cupcakes - however many sprinkles, silver balls, stars or jars of edible glitter you put out for children they will use every single last bit of it. They consider it a waste of a valuable afternoon to not absolutely cover their little cakes in as much decoration as they can hold :)

This week on the market my brownies were very popular - I used very posh Swiss chocolate for some of them but it didn't work nearly as well as the usual fairtrade chocolate or Sainsbury's Belgian chocolate that I use - so it just shows you never can tell. And I've started to make scones too - I really enjoy making them and they sell pretty well too which is good!

Next week on the stall, more brownies, Hugh FW's yummy chocolate cake, sticky toffee cupcakes, scones and much more..

I wish I could work out how to arrange the photos differently with the text next to them but I can't sob. Anyway, these are some photos of cakes that I found tucked away in the file of photos I'd downloaded and thought that they needed a airing. I love doing the cakes with a sprinkle topping and flowers, they look so cute. If you want to do them you just cover the top of your cake in buttercream icing and then - pretty quickly, whilst the icing is still 'wet' - roll it gently in a bowl (a plate's too flat) into which you've poured lots of sprinkles.

Some more birthday cakes - these ones are on the beautiful cake stand my friend Harriet bought me for Christmas. If you put some very pretty cakes on a flowery cake stand they're just going to look better :)

Tomorrow I'm teaching some cupcake classes; one in the morning and one in the afternoon. I've got little ones first and then 24 teenagers eek! I had no idea how much preparation it took to run classes - working how many grammes of things in total has stretched my tiny maths ability to its limit - but I'm really looking forward to doing it and I'll put up a post about how it all goes.

A picture taken by my 9 year old daughter Maddie - pretty good! These are cakes for Cambridge Uni Press for their 'Use your 7 hours' thing (can't think of a word to describe it) where the employees can escape work for a day and go and work for a charity. And the perfect lure for this - and anything else too of course - is to offer people cupcakes :)

A birthday cake from this week - I met the lovely student who was collecting it in town to do the hand over. I had brought it in a box but didn't have a bag that it fitted into so she had to wobble off on her bike carrying it - I hope it got there in one piece!

I made a few of these last week and I'm definitely going to make them again as they were very popular. I got the little ladybirds in a local shop and then piped big flower petals with chocolate buttercream, yummy!

On Saturday I made 100 of these little cuties for a 21st birthday party. They looked so sweet! The only trouble, as always with cupcakes, is getting them to their destination in one piece. I didn't have any proper mini cupcake boxes so we squeezed them into normal cake boxes and put the ones which didn't fit on a tray and then my partner drove whilst I sat with them all on my lap trying desperately not to bounce. So to anyone who drove behind a very scruffy Punto going very, very slowly down Grange Road on Saturday I apologise :)

I realised I hadn't posted the pictures of the maths cupcakes I made the other day and which I was very proud of! I googled the Pi symbol - I failed my maths O level twice so I have no memory of maths thingys - and the number on the top left cake is the square root of pi (apparently). So even maths can be fun when it's on a cupcake (I'm joking, of course maths is very interesting gulp).

We took lots of pictures of the Elvis and sticky toffee cupcakes so I'll post those shortly.