Ginger Bonfire Night cupcakes with popping candy

I wanted to make something for Bonfire Night as we were going to watch the fireworks then back to a friend's house for some food afterwards, and for a long time have had the idea of popping candy in my head. Do you remember eating that when you were a kid? I used to love the way it would fizz and pop in your mouth, and hoped it would have the same effect sprinkled on cupcakes!

I also wanted to make my cupcakes fit the theme so decorated them to look like little bonfires. The cakes themselves are ginger flavour which I think also works really well for this time of year!

The recipe I used was from the book Cupcakes from the Primrose Bakery, though the decoration idea was my own.

There is a separate recipe for the frosting below. For the cakes, you need:

200g butter, softened
175g brown sugar
3 tbsp black treacle
150ml milk
4 pieces stem ginger from a jar of stem ginger in syrup. Chop the ginger and reserve the syrup for the icing.
2 eggs
300g self-raising flour
1 tbsp ground ginger
pinch of salt

Preheat oven to 180C/ 160 C fan.

In a saucepan, melt the butter, sugar and treacle over a low heat. Take off the heat then stir in the milk.

Beat the eggs in another bowl, chop the stem ginger (reserving the syrup) and add the ginger pieces to the egg mixture. Beat this into the butter mixture- either still in the saucepan or you can transfer it to a bowl.

Add the flour, ground ginger and salt and mix well.

Spoon into cupcake cases - I had some Halloween ones as I couldn't find anything that would have specifically worked for Bonfire Night, though in retrospect I think a metallic red would have been good. But I did pretty well with this recipe and had all the ingredients in the house already - even the stem ginger and the treacle - so didn't want to go out and buy cake cases specially.

Bake in the oven for about 30 minutes then leave to cool.

Ginger buttercream frosting
280g butter, softened
8 tbsp ginger syrup from the jar of stem ginger
600g icing sugar

You can either make this in one batch then separate it, or in two as I did. If you want to make two batches, halve the ingredients.
Otherwise, beat the butter until creamy, add the syrup then the icing sugar and mix to make buttercream.

Take each bowl - or separate the mixture into two bowls - and colour one orange and one red. I used some orange Wilton gel colour that I had from Halloween last year, and it only needed a tiny amount to turn a lovely orange colour. For the pink, I used a few drops of liquid food colouring - admittedly it was one that was made from natural ingredients so wasn't neon pink like some are - but then I added a few more drops, and a few more, and still wasn't happy with the colour, so I used a tiny dab of Sugarflair ruby red sugarpaste colouring and that was perfect.

Spoon each icing into a piping bag. This is the point at which I started wishing I had the new duo colour piping bag set from Lakeland as it would have been perfect to use here - you can pipe two colours at once and swirl them together. That was the effect I wanted to create with the red and the orange icing, to look like the flames of the bonfire, so I took it in turns to pipe some of each colour onto the cupcake. I did a small blob of icing and drew the bag upwards so it stood up like a little flame. Unfortunately the red was a little softer than the orange (from all the liquid food colouring, I expect!) so it didn't quite stand up as well, but I thought it still looked nice.

Here you can see how I did one colour first, then the second colour in the gaps around it:

Next I cut up some Cadbury's Flake and arranged the pieces on the cupcake to look like logs on the bonfire.

Now for my favourite part: the popping candy!

I sprinkled a little popping candy on each cupcake in the gap at the top of the flake pieces. I wonder whether I should warn people before they eat the cake, or just let them have the surprise? I think the popping candy will mimic the effect of fireworks going off.

The finished cupcakes for tonight's Bonfire Night party

Strawberry Swirl Cupcakes

 When I made my puppy cupcakes for a bake sale at work, I knew they would take a long time to decorate and I wouldn't end up with very many. So I wanted to make something else as well that would be quicker and easier! I had some pink icing in a can I wanted to try, as I was sent it a while back by Dr. Oetker to review, and I thought strawberry cupcakes would go well with the pink icing. I usually choose the icing to go with the cake rather than the other way round, but not this time!

I looked through some of my recipe books and found the one I wanted to make: strawberries and cream cupcakes, from the Primrose Bakery book 'Cupcakes from the Primrose Bakery'. I did adapt it slightly though, as I didn't use their recipe for the icing and the recipe suggests making a small hole in each cupcake and adding a sponful of jam, which I didn't do as the cupcakes seemed light and moist enough, and I didn't really have much time.

You need:

225g caster sugar

210g self-raising flour

1 tsp baking powder

25g cornflour

125g strawberries, hulled and crushed

225g unsalted butter at room temperature

4 eggs

I started trying to crush the strawberries with the back of a fork but they were quite firm and this wasn't working at all, so I chopped them into small pieces instead. I didn't think that would make any difference as they end up going into a blender anyway! Put sugar, flour, cornflour, baking powser and strawberries into a food processor and pulse.

Add the bitter and the eggs and process. The mixture has taken on a lovely pink colour.

Any more and it would have been overflowing from my food processor!

Pour into cake cases and bake at 180C/ 160fan for about 25 minutes.

The cakes were still fairly pink once they were cooked, which I thought was nice.

Dr. Oetker recently sent me a selection of products to review, including this Easy Swirl Cupcake Icing in pink (it also comes in chocolate and vanilla). It comes with four nozzles that give different effects, and the nozzles are very easy to change over.

The icing is very easy to use; once you've got your chosen nozzle on the end, we found it easiest to press with a thumb as you can then use the rest of your hand to hold the can, and the other hand to hold the cupcake.

This is the result from the first nozzle:

and from the second:

the third:

and the fourth. The nozzles are quite small, so you get a very thin stream of icing. That's perhaps not ideal if you're trying to cover an entire cupcake like we did below, but it would be very good for going around the edge of a cake, or doing an outline on a cookie. I also noticed some amazing cupcakes that someone brought into the bake sale at work - actually made by the wife of one of our senior managers - where she had used a similar nozzle to pipe little patches of green icing over the cake to look like clumpsof grass, and then she had added edible butterflies. They were really good!

We had enough icing to decorate 11 cupcakes from the can, so it's not a cheap option but is quick and easy, doesn't make a mess or mean faffing around with piping bags, and is actually quite fun - I think this would be good for kids! I think I would definitely use it again if I was decorating cookies.

Dr. Oetker had also sent me some shimmer pearls, which come in a nice selection of pastel colours.

This is the view from the top - the plastic pieces across the top mean you can just turn the jar upside down and sprinkle, without them all coming out at once, which is a really good idea.

Having said that, you don't get the most even distribution of pearls if you do just turn it upside down over the cupcake - there's probably a better technique to doing this that I'm not aware of!

A nice selection of strawberry cupcakes, but I do feel they look a little haphazard!

I had some strawberries left over to I sliced a few and placed them on top of the cupcakes

As I had run out of the pink icing I also covered a few in vanilla buttercream and topped them with a strawberry. I think these look a little more sophisticated than the pink ones but they all went down very well at the cake sale!

I'm sending this to Calendar Cakes, hosted by Rachel of Dollybakes and Laura of Laura Loves Cakes, as their theme this month is "The great village show", celebrating all things British in honour of St. George's Day. Strawberries are a particularly British fruit (think Wimbledon) so these cupcakes would be perfect for a village show.