So I spent the day baking for a party. It’s my sisters birthday – a special one and she is having a party. I’m one of 5 girls (there is also a boy) so it will be lots of glamour and I’m sure lots of fun. No glamour today though just lots of baking and lots of Springsteen on the iPod!. I started at 9am and finished this afternoon. Results :- 7 doz various cupcakes and the same in Marcaroons… I know she will appreciate them , I just hope everyone likes the flavours. I’m not going to post the recipes as there are a million cupcake receipes out there, all of which are perfectly good. The one I used today is from the Hummingbird café just because I really like the book, simple recipes and great pictures. The macaroon recipe is the classic Pierre Hermes one but without liquefying egg whites simply because I didn’t fancy having them in the fridge for that long with the risk of picking up fridgy smells. I had also bought lovely gold and silver foil cupcake cases to bake them all in. Very pretty to look at, but my first 3 batches of cakes did not rise properly; I had a hole in the centre of each of them. Suspecting the foil cases, I switched to regular paper and sure enough they were perfect. I don’t know the science, if any, behind this but I have made a million cup cakes before and this has not happened since I was 7 so I’m blaming the foil cases!

I tried to make the filling interesting and came up with the following:-

Passionfruit and white chocolate ganache with a sugar bun crumb

Dark Chocolate ganache with chocolate soil (Thanks Heston!) .. decorated with flowers to resemble a garden

Chocolate and Hazlenut buttercream on dark chocolate cupcakes

Blood Orange buttercream on lemon and orange zest cupcakes

The mararoons were filled with chocolate ganache and passionfruit ganache but I also made one batch with popping candy, lime zest and a lime buttercream… That concoction was all my own work!