Medicaketion: 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.