This cake just goes to show that you really can't beat a vanilla sponge filled with jam and cream - it was the cake that I was the most reluctant to hand over to the recipient!

Here are some cakes I did for my niece for her to take out to the dinner she was having with friends for one of their birthdays - she's 13 and eats out a lot more than I do sob.. They'd asked me for Oreo cakes and I decided to try putting an Oreo at the bottom of the muffin case before baking to see how that worked out. And it worked out really well! I also tried using coloured sugar rather than sprinkles to cover the top of the cake which makes it look like it's covered with little blue diamonds. All in all, very pretty :))

Next Wednesday on the stall:

After surviving the winter on the stall - hooray! I was so warm on the stall this week in the mild weather that I spent most of the day with just my top on (and trousers I hasten to add) - and doing lots of stodgy, comfort food cupcakes like sticky toffee pudding, peanut butter etc which help on a cold day; I'm changing to fresher spring flavours. So next week will be all about lemons, raspberries (not strictly a spring fruit of course but I feel we're all in danger of contracting scurvy if we don't have a fruit apart from apples), blueberries, for muffins, and rhubarb - yummy! I also want to practise using the grass tip for piping icing to make a little 'lawn' on a cupcake for flowers to sit on and it doesn't get much springier than that..

And, finally, I was going to post a picture of the Simnel cake but I took the photos with my phone and they turned out terribly (although the cake turned out beautifully I'm happy to say) even though I'd tied a pale yellow ribbon around the cake and, as far as I'm concerned - and I love all ribbons - the pale yellow is the best of all ribbons. But I'm making another one for a sweet old couple on Tuesday so I'll take a photo of that one with my daughter's camera if I can find it on her bedroom floor (the camera, not the cake).

So next week; photos of spring cupcakes and cakes will abound..

I'm making a Simnel cake! I'm going to post some pictures of it, well if it turns out well I will, and I hope it does because I'm making it for my neighbour who is setting off with her entire - grown-up family and grandchildren - to stay in a house in Norfolk for 2 weeks. I've also just remembered that they are a family of chefs so the pressure is on eek. I made it in a large old fashioned bowl mixing bowl as it is a large traditional cake and it didn't feel right to put the ingredients in the KitchenAid. There are a whole variety of recipes but this one has stem ginger, which I adore so I hope they do too, and glace cherries. It smells delicious. I'm going to make the tradtional topping too of plain marzipan with 11 marzipan balls on top to represent the apostles (but not Judas). I am not at all we gious but I think that, if you're going to make a cake like this, you might as well do it right :) Or as Nigella says so much more poetically; if you're going to get wet, you may as well go swimming..

Until the picture of the Simnel cake is ready I'm posting some pictures of some very big chocolate cupcakes and a couple of cakes I made for my daughters.

How much writing can you get on one cake? Quite a lot apparently :) I had already made a batch of cupcakes for Huia-Lee (commisoned by her friend) so that's why it says 'again' at the bottom of the cake! I'd been asked to use these colours and to make it cute which is why there's a little Hello Kitty clinging onto the side - nothing says cute to a group of girls like Hello Kitty.. I found these marshmallows, bizarrely, in BhS but they don't have them any more. Before that I had bought some from Topshop and I've seen similar ones in Chinatown in London but not quite the same. This is why a cupcake enthusiast must be always vigilant; you never know when you're going to find a fantastic topping for your cakes and - once you have found them - you never know when the supply is going to run out, it's all go...

Birthday Cupcakes!
Here are some cupcakes I made at the weekend for a student's birthday. I had woken up early in the morning to make them and then quickly threw on some make up and scraped my hair up to deliver them. When I got there she got out her camera and took some photos to put on facebook aargh! So there will be a picture of a pretty student, some pretty cakes and a wrinkly old lady with a hair tragedy...
I really think these are one of the best sets I've ever made - I've finally (nearly) got the knack of writing with icing down to a fine art and I love the butterflies with the flowers. The kitchen looks like a bomb's hit it after making a set of cakes like this - making large quantities of buttercream in a KitchenAid sprays icing sugar around the walls (even though I stand with a tea towel held over it to try and contain most of it), the cake baking has already added to the chaos and then my partner was making a full English breakfast at the same time. I need a bigger kitchen..

Banoffi Pie and Maltesers cupcakes!

These were some of the cakes I took with me this Wednesday to the market. I couldn't find the camera so I took these with my phone and they're not too bad.. The top two rows are banoffi pie cupcakes - banana cupcake topped with dulce de leche then vanilla buttercream and then either rolled in chocolate sprinkles or just sprinkled with them with banana chips on top! - they were very popular :) The bottom ones are malted cupcakes filled with chocolate sauce and a malteser, they also have a malteser on top and I was very very pleased with them.

It was lovely to be out on the stall without freezing to death. For the last few months I have worn at least 5 layers of clothing and still been cold. I usually then spent the day holding on to a cup of hot tea or counting the minutes until I could buy my weekly vegetable Thai green curry from the little stall behind me (I made myself wait until 12 before I could have it and it would then keep me warm - eating it, not holding it like the tea! - until at least 1.30), but this week I was warm all day. I even took my coat off a couple of times, pretty soon the vest'll come off and then we'll know it's really spring :))

Two photos (do they look exactly the same? I thought one was slightly different but now I'm not so sure, oops..) of a batch of birthday cakes. They are lemon, Oreo, chocolate and banana flavours and were ordered by the birthday girl's friend who asked for pink, white and yellow and pretty flowers so I hope they're pleased with them :)

Here's the picture of my lovely vase filled with flowers. I got the orange roses from one of my children for Mother's Day and the tulips were from a birthday party that I did with a group of 11 year olds for a 'make, bake and decorate' party. We had a fantastic time, the girls made vanilla cupcakes and I gave them a choice of things that they could put in - it was easier to do it this way than to offer a huge range of different recipes. I took lemons, raspberry jam, Oreos and chocolate chips with me and, without fail, they chose Oreos AND chocolate chips! Lemon was rejected early on as being too healthy and jam has a bit of fruit in so that too was rejected so chocolate biscuits with extra choc chips was always going to be the winner :)

Then they decorated them with the usual array of vanilla buttercream icing, sprinkles, cut out butterflies and glitter! I'll post some photos when I have them.

For mother's day we went to London to visit my eldest son and for the first time in ages I didn't take a cake we took the one that Daisy's Spanish exchange student had brought with her as a present. She's from Zaragoza and it was a local speciality - a sort of danish pastry but dipped in sugar with extra nuts and chocolate, it was very good!!

This Wednesday on the stall I'm doing Banoffi Pie cupcakes (banana cupcakes with dulce de leche filling, vanilla frosting, chocolate sprinkles and banana chips on top), malted cupcakes with a malteser and chocolate spread filling, lemon cupcakes with lemon curd filling and one other which I haven't decided yet :) I'll post the photos when they are ready and waiting on Wednesday morning...

And here is a whole bunch of the same cake as in the post below. These photos (and most of the ones that appear here) are taken by my daughter Daisy in her pjs at about 7.30 in the morning after I've been up and cake making for a couple of hours. Daisy comes down to make breakfast and I persuade/beg her to take some photos of the cakes because she's much better at it than I am..

These were some of the cakes I had on the stall yesterday, but I always do some traditional cakes too and one of the most popular is carrot cake. It's the Delia recipe and always comes out so well - the best part is the syrup you make for the sponges before putting it together (like the syrup you make for a lemon drizzle cake) which is dark brown sugar and orange juice. It smells soo good. So here is a picture of that too!

This is an Oreo cookie cupcake (vanilla sponge with about 3 Oreos crushed and stirred into the sponge mixture before cooking) topped with vanilla buttercream with a mini oreo type cookie (from the Korean shop on Mill Road) in the icing. And on a cold Wednesday morning, under the grey skies of this endless winter, you really can't say fairer than that :)

A couple of pictures of a lovely cake I made recently. Slightly wonky writing on the cake but I don't think anyone noticed. I used to not like buttercream at all when I was little but now I can't get enough of the stuff - the recipes nowadays make it much lighter and fluffier and with a teaspoon of vanilla extract it is delicious (too delicious as my control tights will confirm..) The vase behind the cake is a huge pink and gold one that one of my sons bought me for my last birthday - it looks gorgeous but you have to have a huge bunch of flowers to fill it so it usually languishes on a shelf. I'll post a picture of it where you can see the flowers just because it looks so good and it's a rare event :)

After doing a few make, bake and decorate sessions recently I realised I hadn't actually taken any photos of people doing the fun bit so I'm posting some pictures we took when we went to see our friends in Devon over the half term. I made some cakes (some of the pictures have appeared here!) and we all decorated them. It was really good fun although I bought a couple of new piping tips (the ones used for writing on the cakes with) as everyone wanted to use that one :) As you can see we had a range of ages there :) and everyone from 7 to 47 (won't say who that is) enjoyed it..

I am soo pleased with the Oreo ones - I wanted to see if you could pipe icing onto sprinkles and it turns out you can! I'm going to make more of those for next week as they proved very popular and I'd only made those 4 which was a bit sad :( But for the lucky few they had delicious vanilla cupcakes with crushed Oreos in the sponge and then filled with chocolate spread and covered in chocolate sprinkles - it doesn't get much better than that! The ones above that are strawberry jam cupcakes with a jam filling so it's like a little Victoria sponge all in one.

I've been doing cookery classes recently - some with children and some with adults. The most recent was last Friday at a church on Hills Road and it was great fun. There were 12 women and one poor man who had come along to race through dessert and cake making. They made white chocolate mousse, chocolate tart, tuiles and 2 flavours of cupcakes as well as practising some decorating techniques! The room was filled with a cloud of icing sugar but luckily the Prosecco was flowing so everyone enjoyed themselves including the man who was over from Israel to practise his English. He was adopted by a lovely older lady working on his table so he seemed to be ok - what an intro to an English Friday night...

These are the cakes I did today for the hockey team. I tried to get the Cambridge blue colour, I really did but, as you can see, failed miserably and got a sort of bluey green (which I suppose it is really) instead. But the cakes are super yummy - Oreo with chocolate filling, strawberry with strawberry jam filling, caramel and chocolate - and I even did 2 gluten free and one lactose free! The poor lactose free person had to have the gluten free cake with a glace icing but the cake I make for that is an orange and almond one so hopefully it wasn't too bad :))

My daughter Maddie is sitting next to me and asking me to say what a great person she is and that she is the greatest cake tester in the world which I'm happy to do as it's true...

Latest scoop: We are hoping to open a cafe soon!! It is all nearly there and organised - we are just waiting for the fat lady to sing and then it will all be sorted - and then I'll post details. I can't wait, although the day I leave the market will be a day of much weeping.