Valentines Cupcakes - Just Bake

So Valentines is coming up and you either love it or hate it, it is of course another holiday that comes with the possibility of baking - so of course I love it!

I was asked by Just Bake to create some cute cupcakes for them to get in the spirit and they sent me some gorgeous looking chocolate golden hearts (£2.90)* to do the job with. I really love using gold in baking as it used to be so hard to do, but with cupcake decorations like these it's much easier to add some glam to your cakes.

As it's Valentines coming up I thought the best cupcakes to make were of course red velvet, so I used my favourite recipe. Not even the most rugged of men could refuse these bad boys, and if you're just baking them for yourself - then so what, indulge!!

So for the decoration I decided on the classic cream cheese icing, there really is no other choice for red velvet in my opinion. As the classic symbol for love is a heart I thought I'd make these the focus for the decoration. On some I covered them in gold hearts, dotted them around, artisticly placed a couple of top - and of course drenched them in my trademark love for edible glitter!

Some I covered in gold glitter and the others I added lashings of hot pink glitter for the girly eaters.

I also added a copious amount of gold sugar balls and some love heart cupcake wrappers. I love how glitzy they came out...I may have sneaked a few of the chocolate hearts before...just you know, to check they weren't poisoned, would be silly not to wouldn't it?

What is everyone else baking for Valentines? Can't wait to see what everyone else comes up with. Pin It Now!

Despicable Me Birthday Cake

Ok so I know I've been completely rubbish and haven't blogged in AGES. I promise to do much more of it, and watching the GBBO Comic Relief special as we speak, I feel inspired!

Anyway this cake I actually made at the start of the month for my best friend's birthday and only finally getting around the uploading it now. This cake was for Sarah, judging by the cake you may think she is no more than 8? Think again! We're both 25 and have just celebrated out tenth year of friendship (yes we're sad and count). One of our many childish obsessions, of which there are many, one of our favourites is the film 'Despicable Me'. I've made her a lot of fancy cakes in the past so this year I decided to totally regress.

The cake itself is made with a Victoria sponge filled with pink buttercream, what else? Once filled and dirty iced I then covered it with lilac icing that I coloured with Sugarflair's Grape Violet colouring paste.

Right so for the detail on the top, normally I use stencils to get a perfect shape but I completely forgot to print them off so went for it freehand, and somehow it worked out alright actually! I decided to make one of the 'minions' - our favourite characters. It was actually pretty difficult to get it right but I especially love the eyes and mouth. I really didn't want to overdo the top so I just added a '25' and a couple of heart as the rest of the focus was going to go on the sides...

The sides! I decided to go old school with this, drawing on memories from my mum's rainbow cake (more on that another time) and absolutely cake the sides (did you see what I did there?) in Smarties! And when I say Smarties, I mean about 7 or 8 tubes worth, but I love the effect so it was all worth it!

She loved the cake, yay! And I'm already planning on what to make her for next year, the possibilities are endless!

Nom! x Pin It Now!