Hen Cupcakes

I am always keen to have a baking project so when someone at work asked me to make cupcakes for a hen party; I couldn’t wait to get started and began to sketch ideas. The brief was for thirty cupcakes: any colour but not be too girly and with ‘rude’ decorations! My initial idea was a pun on cocktails (I’ll trust you can figure out the rest....). I was thinking of mojito or pina colada flavoured cupcakes and frosting decorated with a cocktail umbrella and a ‘rude’ straw :)

After a request for ‘bubbly’ to be used in the cupcakes, I decided to adapt my idea and in the end I settled on 15 vanilla cupcakes filled with cava pastry cream and iced with cava flavoured frosting and 15 red velvet filled with chocolate ganache and iced with cream cheese frosting. I kept my original decoration idea for the cava cupcakes and for the red velvets I decided to stick with a red and white theme and made ‘L plates’ from icing which I paired with lip jelly sweets.

So last Thursday night I prepared for a late night baking session and accepted this would mean very little sleep. Accompanied by my trusty F.R.I.E.N.D.S box set and an extensive catalogue of Gervais’ XFM radio shows I set about destroying my kitchen with flour and icing sugar!


Although they were tasty, I don’t think I’d make the cava cupcakes again as the flavour doesn’t come through very well and it’s just not the same without the fizz. Frankly I’d rather drink it! However I still want to experiment with cocktail flavours so expect some boozy posts in the future.... :) My baking and cooking tends to be unstructured so I enjoyed having a theme, task and deadline. I am yet to hear from the hen party but I hope the girls enjoyed them – the leftover cakes certainly went down well.

I was also able to christen my new investment with this batch of cupcakes -it made my morning a lot less stressful. I had to take the umbrellas and straws off the cakes to fit them in the courier but there was plenty of space for the deep cupcakes with a generous mountain of frosting.

In other, exciting news I have now completed my food safety certificate and registered with Lambeth Council so I am look forward to the Great Brixton Bake-Off on April 28th. I will be entering into three categories: “Cupcakes”, “Cakes” and “Biscuits and Bites” so now I need to work out how on earth to choose just one of each! Suggestions are welcome and if you see me in the next few weeks chances are I will force feed you cake and then make you fill out a four page evaluation document (but don’t let that put you off!)


More baking fun soon.... X