I like to take every opportunity I can to bake without just making things for the sake of it or always be eating unhealthy cupcakes and such! So, normally that includes mine and my partners birthdays, Christmas, Easter, Halloween, Valentine's Day and anniversaries.
It was my friends birthday at the start of June, I was looking for an extra gift to get her and was stuck, also unfortunately me and my partner couldn't do anything with her to celebrate due to work (well, and Covid) so I thought I'd bake her something for her birthday!
I couldn't decide whether to do chocolate cupcakes or vanilla cupcakes, all I knew is I had an idea in mind, I was going for buttercream and Kinder Bueno's as decoration, I then decided I wanted to arrange the cupcakes on a board in the shape of her initial. At work we reduced the price on some baking supplies, so I picked up some Renshaw's Vanilla Frosting so I cheated a bit but I didn't have that much time to make the cupcakes so this was good.
I made chocolate cupcakes using the 'ULTIMATE CHOCOLATE CUPCAKES' recipe from 'Pretty Simple Sweet' {https://prettysimplesweet.com/ultimate-chocolate-cupcakes/#wprm-recipe-container-11289 }, I made 18 cupcakes with this recipe and topped them with the Renshaw's vanilla frosting (I just added food colouring) plus some Kinder Bueno's and some chocolate hearts.
I wanted to add some decoration as well as the cupcake arranged in the 'A' so I decided I wanted to make some miniature cupcakes to arrange at the corner of the cake board and decorate them as sort of a bouquet of flowers. I couldn't find a recipe I liked the look of
when it came to 'mini cupcakes' so I used the 'VANILLA CUPCAKES' from 'Pretty Simple Sweet' { https://prettysimplesweet.com/vanilla-cupcakes/#wprm-recipe-container-11988 }, I was going to half this recipe as it said it would make 36 mini cupcakes and I didn't need that many, but half way through adding half of every ingredient I forgot and added both eggs (DOH!) so I added the full quantities, I ended up making 24 mini cupcakes and 6 normal sized ones from that batch. I used the vanilla frosting (adding food colouring) and piped some on the mini ones too.
Both recipes were great, so nice, moist, very easy to follow and I will be sticking to these recipes for the time being, go check out 'Pretty Simple Sweet's recipes.
I'm proud of how these came out, the cupcakes were good, the frosting would have been so much better if I had made the buttercream myself from scratch but I took the lazy route, however I still think they look nice and I'm proud of the decoration and how it looks!
I'm not the best baker, I just do it as a hobby, because I enjoy it, but I want to improve and if one day I can turn it into something more than that then that would be amazing, follow my journey on here and especially on my Instagram https://www.instagram.com/dlouisebakes/
Thanks for reading, stay safe and be kind!
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