I have made quite a few things from the Hummingbird books but I with the help of a new piping set I picked up at Lakeland, I think these cupcakes are my best effort to date.
I chose to go with the chocolate cupcakes as I wanted to focus my attention today on the icing and decorating as opposed to the cake. You can find it on Page 17 of The Hummingbird Bakery Cookbook I'm very careful these days not to overcook my cakes so as not to dry them out. I always put the timer on for a few minutes less that the shortest time recommended in the recipe. You can always put them back in to cook a bit longer, but you can't uncork them.
Once the cakes were backed and left to cool on wire racks I moved to making my buttercream icing.
I made double the quantity of cakes, so went for 1 quantity of vanilla buttercream and 1 quantity of chocolate buttercream, each from page 11 of the book. As it states in the book, the trick is to beat the buttercream as much as possible to get a light fluffy consistency.
I also went with some fondant decorations for my cakes: just some simple designs cut out using plunge cutters you can pick up at any store that sells baking tools (or Amazon like I did). However, the one tool I couldn't have done without in this instance was my piping set that I picked up at Lakeland last weekend. I have struggled in the past piping buttercream on cupcakes and the nozzles I had were so small. Upon spotting these ones at Lakeland last weekend on a trip to Bath I couldn't get to the register fast enough to hand over my hard earned pounds. You can find the one I got on Lakeland's website here.
So, with some pink vanilla buttercream and some chocolate buttercream and a few flowers and stars made from rolled fondant that I dyed with some food colouring I carted the following cakes which were absolutely delicious!!!!
