Preparing cut flowers for arranging

British flowers for Valentine's Day

The Snowdrop

The language of flowers

Flower Cupcakes

Summer Flower Cupcakes

I'm always very pleased with anything that arrives at JibberJabber Towers for me to try out but I was particularly happy when a package was delivered from the lovely people at bakingmad.com. I am already familiar with a number of their products as they are people behind brands such as Billington's sugar, Silver Spoon baking products and Allinson flour. 

If you are ever stuck for a bit of baking inspiration there are a number of great picnic recipes on their website. With my garden now in full bloom I thought I would give the recipe for Flower Cupcakes a try. While you may have perfected your own basic cupcake recipe I was attracted by the addition of some ground almonds. I always keep a stock of ground almonds in my cupboard as I do like to throw a handful into my baking. One thing I have found with cupcake recipes is that often the mixture isn't enough to fill all the cases so a batch of 12 lined up looks rather mismatched. This was not the case with this recipe as they all came out evenly filled.

Another problem I have with cupcakes is the topping. I don't like piping bags simply because they are very messy and I'm rubbish at piping anyway. The recipe calls for a special piping nozzle in order to create the petal effect. Obviously I don't own such a thing so I just used a flat nozzle instead. My top tip for distracting the eye away from any dodgy piping work is to blind people with colour! Rather than sticking to just the pink I divided the icing mixture into three and use the green and yellow colours as well. Each of the boxes gives a colour guide as to how deep the colour will go depending on how many drops you use. So much better than liquid food colouring. I used 6 drops of each colour. To finish each 'flower' off I placed a Silver Spoon Coloured Choco Bean in the centre to represent the stigma.

With three different icing colours one easy way to get some flavour is to match the colour to the taste. A few drops on the peppermint flavouring in the green, raspberry in the pink and vanilla or almond in the yellow.

So there we go – cupcake making for people who are rubbish at piping! If you want some further hints and tips there is a video on bakingmad.com on how to make cupcakes. With the other goodies I'm going to try some more summer baking. I think I may be brave and try the coloured icing.

Bakingmad.com sent me the selection of products for free. No payment was made for writing this post.