Halloween Eyeball cupcakes

 Once again rather behind on my posts!!I love Halloween and this year was even more special as it was the first year that I could celebrate it with Chloe! I can´t wait till she´s a bit older to hold a Halloween party for her and her friends!This year though we celebrated Halloween in a pretty mudane kind of way. For starters, I had to work till 9pm so there was no trick-or-treating but I think she´s still a bit young for that anyway. There was a Halloween part at her nursery school,which she dressed up for...we managed to find a cute little witch´s costume.

The day after Halloween (All Saint´s ) is a bank holiday in Spain so I decided to whip up Annabel Karmel´s Halloween Eyeball Cupcakes although instead of the vanilla, I used lemon rind to give them a nice lemony flavour. As I didn´t have much icing sugar, I made some glace icing,half of which I coloured green using yellow and blue liquid food colouring. I then used assorted sweets for the eyeballs and to make the faces. Unfortunately,they don´t look quite as good as the photos pictured on the recipe webpage but nevertheless these are easy to bake and great fun to make and decorate with your kids. I tried to involve Chloe by trying to let her help me mix the green icing but all she wanted to do was to try and eat it and then wandered off to find her daddy!!Maybe I have to wait till she´s a little older to try and do some baking/cooking with her. I´m looking forward to when we can bake/cook together!

Ladybird cake for my daughter´s first birthday & Annabel Karmel´s white and dark chocolate cupcakes

 I can´t believe my daughter has finally turned one!! The year has flown by and it´s been a busy but enriching one full of joy and happiness. My little baby is no longer a baby,now she´s a little girl! They grow up far too quickly in my opinion.

I was busy preparing her first birthday party,preparing and decorating the Annabel Karmel White & Dark Chocolate cupcakes and making and decorating her first birthday cake, a ladybird cake plus preparing two salads and other party food. Luckily, I had my parents´,my inlaws and my husband´s help but parties are definitely hard work....maybe next year we´ll have the party in a ball pool place so all I have to do is stick to making the cake!!!It also means that I´d actually get to spend more time with my daughter on her actual birthday!

I made the cupcakes on the Friday two days before the party and froze them,then took them out to defrost early on the morning of the party. I made the white chocolate buttercream and decorated them with red heart sprinkles and yellow and white star sprinkles.

The ladybird cake was a Hot Milk Sponge cake made the day before the party. I found this link about a ladybird cake, which helped me a lot. I covered the cake with red and black fondant and cut black fondant circles out for the ladybird´s spots using a bottletop (a great tip from the link I found)! Who says you need fancy equipment to decorate cakes? The leftover white fondant I had was rock hard but as I had a bit of white chocolate buttercream left I used that for the whites of the ladybird´s eyes but unfortunately it wasn´t quite as neat and round as I´d have liked and two more black fondant circles for the pupils. I was going to use pipe cleaners for the antennae but couldn´t find any so used the bendy part of two straws instead. I covered them in black fondant and then made two small balls for the feelers of the antennae. I was pretty pleased with the end result!