I've badly neglected the blog recently due to the summer holidays but am back now ready to start baking again! Well, I have been baking during the holidays but not the glamourous kind that usually appears here :) So I'm just going to post some photos of cakes that I've made recently and cupcakes from last week's stall. The top picture is a cake for a friend's daughter who wanted rainbow icing and the ones below are apple and blackberry crumble cupcakes using apples and blackberries from my own garden, very homely :)

This week on the stall I'll have brown sugar pound cakes, delicious!

Well, I didn't quite around to the tiramisu(ish) cupcakes due to no coffee syrup and I thought that a homemade one might not be quite thick enough soo I've made other delicious things instead and here are some pictures!

The ones here are Hello Kitty vanilla cupcakes with raspberry and vanilla cream filling and peach cupcakes (made with peach puree and peach pieces in the sponge) filled with a blackberry compot and topped with a blackberry too (all blackberries from the garden - the ones the birds have left..).

So, tomorrow's cupcakes are well under way. I'm doing carrot ones for tomorrow using Delia's idea of putting a lovely orange and dark sugar syrup over the top of each cupcake so that it soaks in and makes them lovely and moist.

I'm also doing a flourless chocolate and almond cake which comes out with a texture a bit like a brownie but it's not quite so nervewracking to cook.

And I'm using some of the Hello Kitty cupcake wrappers that my daughter Daisy brought me back from the US - the look soo cute!

Photos of all this yumminess will appear tomorrow :))

Cakes from the stall today - I made the chocolate slightly more glamorous than usual by adding chocolate chips, and crushing Oreos onto the chocolate frosting, adding a segment of chocolate orange and then covering the whole lot with caramel sauce, yum! The ones with a cherry on top are actually blackberry ones using blackberries from our very own garden :) The chocolate and lemon meringue (filled with lovely, sharp lemon curd made with free range eggs) were the most popular today.

A man from a gallery in Cambridge bought a box to display in his gallery so I hope he arranged them nicely! He was going to leave them in the box first of all and just open the lid so people could help themselves but I suggested a plate might make them look more attractive :))

It was cold outside on the market today - a reminder of winter Wednesdays spent shivering and drinking hot tea every half an hour (we usually leave it every 45 minutes in summer).

And now I'm going to have a stall on Sunday too! I can't wait - I've been trying to get onto the Sunday farmers' market for ages and now I've done it, now feel slightly nervous gulp..

Here are some of the cakes from the stall this week - the bottom one was definitely the most popular: a vanilla cupcake, filled with caramel sauce, topped with fluffy buttercream and covered with marshmallows, sugar crystals, crushed digestives AND melted dark chocolate. It was bloomin delicious :))

Graduation day cupcakes for a large business school in Cambridge. It was great fun making the graduation caps and scrolls. I hand tied the scrolls with strawberry sweet shoelaces which took ages but the effect was worth it :)) Apparently another department in the same school liked the cupcakes so much that they want to order 500 for next year! I'd better start baking now eek..

Cakes from the stall this week - it was back to cake eating weather this week after the heat, hooray! The two cupcakes in the picture are Oreo (the ones with the chocolate sweet on top) and raspberry. I really like the look of these ones and they were definitely the most popular. I also had some lovely boxes this week (thank you mum!) which fit 6 cupcakes and have a polka dot design so I'm going to make sure I have some of those with me every week. I didn't have enough bags though which I usually use for one or two cupcakes so this week people took the cakes away in a combination of bags kindly given to me by Ark and Pret a Manger, and some little cellophane bags instead of my usual paper ones. I put the cakes in them and tie the tops with a ribbon which looks very pretty..

We had lemon meringue, mocha and chocolate cupcakes too but the photos didn't come out too well as I was using my phone so you'll have to trust me that they looked good and tasted even better :))