Rainbow cupcakes

Birthday time again – and my turn to make cakes for the Friday cake meeting at work. I decided to use up one of the small Christmas cakes that I had left over from Christmas (still well preserved in a mixture of sloe gin / cherry brandy / plum liqueur!) and make a couple of complementary cakes. As there is a coeliac amongst my colleagues, I made the very delicious gluten-free carrot, coconut and pistachio cake that I last made in October again.

Cupcakes are generally seen as one of my specialities and I hadn’t made any for a while, so I decided that I would make some lemon cupcakes, filled with passion fruit curd (as I had some in the fridge!) and topped with lemon buttercream.

Given the never-ending rain that we have all had recently, I was inspired by some rainbow-themed cupcakes that I had seen on Pinterest. When it came to decorating the cakes, I tried just smoothing the buttercream on with a pallet knife but my pallet knife skills are not the best and it looked a bit scruffy to me. I decided to go with my ever-reliable  Wilton 2D nozzle and pipe roses. The clouds were piped with a small round nozzle. The rainbows themselves were fizzy multi-coloured belt sweets – cut in half and then stuck down into the clouds.

These cupcakes always taste fantastic – I just love the tangy passion fruit curd combined with the zingy lemon cake and buttercream. When they were first complete, I wasn’t that happy with the finished look but the next morning, I did feel a bit more confident about them – and everyone at work loved them!  If I were to do them again (maybe with a bit more time), I’d love to add little pots of gold to these!