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.