the weekend's baking

This weekend I spent a lot of time doing my favourite thing. Baking. And lots of it. It was my beautiful friend Hannah's birthday, so of course, I had to make cake. (Hannah, by the way, has recently become a Mummy to a beautiful daughter, Rachel, who I must photograph sometime - Han can we arrange that, please?)

Having checked with Hannah's husband and found that her Mum had made her a chocolate cake, I scoured my recipe books for ideas that weren't chocolatey.

I decided upon Orange Cupcakes with Orange buttercream frosting, and Caramel Cupcakes. One flavour just didn't seem enough, and I was more than happy to have an excuse to make different kinds of cake. The recipes came from the Primrose Bakery recipe book, written by two inspirational women, who set up their cake business in their homes, before branching out and becoming very popular, selling to the great store, Selfridges. Someday I hope to be like them. 

They turned out a little like this:

After baking a batch of each, I was on a roll, so carried right on and made some mini versions of the orange cupcakes that were tiny and perfectly bitesized. The only difference with the miniature ones was that I piped fresh cream with orange zest on top for the icing instead of buttercream. There is something about miniature cakes that I just love. Maybe it's that you get the same tasty hit as you do with a normal sized cupcake, but without so much concern as to how it will add to your wasteline...

As a side note to any of you who have been wondering what on earth has happened to my Bake2010 blog, it all fell by the wayside a bit when we got married. I kept planning on posting about our wedding cake, but never quite managed to before doing another lot of baking, so I decided to just post what was coming out of my oven here rather than there. Sadly I have lost count of how many cakes I have baked, as I thought might happen once this year got a whole lot busier with wedding planning. I'm not seeing it as failure though, as I have not stopped baking, I've just stopped counting...