Seaside themed cupcakes.

On Wednesday it was the annual summer fair at my children’s school. It was a good afternoon and there were lots of activities for the children to do and lots of different stalls. One of the stalls was a cake and cupcake stall so I decided I would make and donate some cupcakes for the school to sell, to help raise some money. As the school summer holidays are just around the corner I decided to go with a summer and seaside theme. These are the cupcakes I made.

I was very pleased when I received a letter from the school thanking me for the cupcakes. The letter also said that a lot of the cupcakes had been sold prior to the fair opening. As if my day couldn’t get any better, the headteacher mentioned to me that I could have my own stall next year if I was interested…..yay!! Oh and I had one of the winning raffle tickets as well. A good day all around.

Scones,strawberries and cream.

Well a few days ago I decided to do some baking with my 6 year old son. We needed to decide what to bake and after looking through a few recipe books we decided to bake some rich scones.

Here is the recipe we used. It is perfect if you want something quick, easy and very tasty. This recipe makes 8 rich scones.

• 225 g (8 oz) Self raising flour.
• pinch of salt.
• 50 g (2 oz) Margarine/Butter.
• 25 g (1 oz) Caster sugar.
• 50 g (2 oz) Currants/Sultanas.
• 1 Medium egg (beaten) + added milk making 150 ml (1/4 pint) of liquid.

Here is what we did.

1) Heat oven to 220 C,  425 F, Gas mark 7. Grease a baking tray.

2) Mix flour and salt together, rub in the margarine and then stir in the sugar and the fruit.

3) Add the egg and milk mixture, keeping a little for brushing the tops of the scones.

4) Knead on a floured surface and roll out to 1cm (1/2 inch) in thickness. Cut out into 6.5 cms (2.5″) rounds. Keep re-rolling  and cutting until all the mixture has been used up.

5) Brush the tops with the egg and milk mixture and bake for approximately 10 minutes.

These are the scones fresh from the oven.

What better to accompany the freshly baked scones than strawberries.

These strawberries were homegrown strawberries, grown by my mum. I think these were some of the best  tasting strawberries I have ever tasted.

Don’t forget the cream!

and finally…………. here is my son feeling very proud of himself and sampling the delicious scones he made.

Hello Kitty cake

This is my latest cake, a Hello Kitty cake. This cake was for a little girl who was celebrating her 4th Birthday and who loves Hello Kitty. As I have boys myself I wasn’t sure what Hello Kitty was so I had to do some much-needed googling. At first I was thinking about doing a round cake with kitty on top but I decided I would like to do something different, this is the design I came up with. This cake was quite large, it measured approximately 16″ in length.