Festicakes

Last year I began a tradition of taking my cakes to festivals.  It all started at a lovely little music festival in Gloucestershire called 2000 trees when I baked more cakes than even my friends and my eager appetites for cake eating could devour.  So we took them around the festival and gave them to people we met, if they managed to beat me in arm wrestle...(my biceps were in better shape back then).  It proved to be a lot of fun, and a great way to meet lots of lovely people - a testament to the power of cake!

This year for Green Man Festival in Wales I went all out and baked about 30 cupcakes of 3 different varieties; pink grapefruit, chocolate and beetroot and chocolate, beetroot and blackberry.  My biceps not feeling quite up to the challenge this year, we made people work harder themselves for the cakes.  This mainly involved press-ups or doing something stupid, or sometimes we just rewarded a friendly smile (even from the stewards doing SFA...).

The pink grapefruit cupcakes were from a recipe I came across online and had really wanted to try, they have some greek yoghurt in the mix which I am a big fan of as it make the sponge fluffy and moist and moreish.  The pink grapefruit flavour was a really tasty alternative to the more traditional lemon flavoured citrussy cakes.  For the decorations I went very girly for half of the cakes and a bit jazzy for the other, swirling some ruby red food colouring into the wet icing, the latter were my favourites.

The chocolate and beetroot cakes are a tried and tested recipe, one of my absolute favourites.  I took it from Fiona Cairn's beautiful baking book 'Bake and Decorate'.  I added some fresh blackberries to half my mix though as an experimental twist and also put some blackberry juice into the icing (stewed blackberries with a little sugar pushed through a sieve) which adds to the colour and taste.

The chocolate, beetroot and  blackberry cakes were topped with blackberry and beetroot icing, white and dark chocolate and blackcurrant sherbet.  

The plain chocolate and beetroot cakes I topped with a simple chocolate buttercream.  

The fantastic boxes I used were from Morrissons, two for £2; I highly recommend their baking section it is full of little gems like these.  

Good cakes.  Good festival.  Good times.

:)

Easy

Time for tea

Some 'tea-cup-cakes' I made last week as a well deserved treat (particularly for Emily the driver) after driving several hundred miles around London, Derbyshire and Surrey emptying our flat.  The silicon cases were a birthday present from a very lovely Miss Connie Szecsei.  I had been looking forward to trying them out after the dreaded end of year exams were over and they didn't disappoint, I think they are beautiful! 

I filled the lovely cases with some lemon drizzle cupcakes and topped them with some italian meringue, lemon zest and fresh berries from the garden, simple, but pretty and delicious :)

Speaking of birthdays...

...I had my own birthday not so long ago and it happened to coincide with the birthdays of some other lovely people, so we had a bit of a do in a nice camden pub.  We were presented with some beautiful, and delicious, cakes :)

I  love giraffes, it was difficult bringing myself to cut the first slice of this one, made by the highly talented Francesa Mitchell. 

I also made a few little cakes for the other birthday girls:

Passion fruit meringue cupcakes: Greek yoghurt sponge with passion fruit curd and italian meringue on top, decorated with some of my hoard from the sweet shop in Haslemere :)

Birthday Bonanza

This weekend was my sister's 30th and I had the task of making the cake, something I eagerly volunteered for - planning it had kept me occupied in many a dull lecture over the past few months!  Like myself, my sister adores passion fruit so that was the basis of the main cake, and for a bit of extra fun I did some indulgent millionaires shortbread.  It was a lot of fun to do and the plates were cleared fairly quickly, which is always an encouraging sign :)

The main event; passion fruit chiffon cake with a passion fruit cream filling (a recipe I hadn't tried before, tasty but I think I prefer a more traditional english sponge mix - if I did it again I'd use the passion fruit cupcake recipe from Susannah Blake's cupcake book, it's delicious)

Millionaire's shortbread 'cupcakes'; I made them individually in a deep muffin tin