Honey and lemon cupcakes

Having made Hummingbird cupcakes for the netball girls to celebrate my birthday, next step was to decide on cakes to take to work. I decided to take my actual birthday as leave, so decided to take cakes in the following Monday – which gave me the weekend to prepare! As there are quite a few people to cater for, I decided to chuck together another Sticky Ginger Cake, as I’ve made it before for work and it has gone down really well. Next, I felt that it was expected that I produce cupcakes of some kind, so decided to have another go at the Honey and Lemon cupcakes that I made recently. Finally, I decided to make some simple lemon finger biscuits – will write these up in the next blog post. 

The honey and lemon cupcakes were inspired by Martha Kearney on Great British Bake Off for Comic Relief and last time I made them, I had a go at copying her Beehive style decoration. Although they tasted delicious, I wasn’t that satisfied with the overall appearance and they were very fiddly to decorate so I decided to have go with a slightly different design for the cupcakes this time. 

I was mainly happy with the overall design of these cupcakes this time – although I’m not sure the actual beehives looked quite right. I started by swirling the buttercream onto the cupcake with a large round nozzle (mine is from this set). If I were to do again, I may try using the same nozzle but instead of simple piping a swirl, building dots of icing one on top of another – this may create a better beehive. I then coloured the buttercream with green colour paste and used one of these piping nozzles (although I got mine in a set like this one from Lakeland - incredibly useful!) to pipe on the grass. 

Finally, I decorated the cupcakes with bees and flowers made from ready-to-roll icing.

The bees are actually quite fiddly to make but worth the effort:

1. Start by rolling a small cone shape of yellow ready-to-roll icing. 
2. Roll out black ready-to-roll icing on a surface lightly dusted with icing sugar - it will need to be very thin. 
3. Cut into very thin strips. 
4. Dip a clean paintbrush in water and lightly run over your yellow cone. 
5. Stick two strips of the black icing onto the cone to create your bee's stripes. 
6. Use a sharp knife to make two small incisions on the back of your bee. 
7. Find two similarly sized pieces of sliced almond and dip one tip of each piece in water.
8. Insert the dampened tips into the incisions created in the bee - this will be your bee's wings. 
9. Use a black food colouring pen to add eyes.