Look at the purdy flowers!

I had a cupcake order to bake for the weekend and as is my wont I decided baking lemon cupcakes with lemon buttercream, coconut cupcakes with vanilla buttercream and vanilla cupcakes with lilac-coloured vanilla buttercream just wasn't enough work for one day alongside entertaining my father for an hour or so, picking Betty up from pre-school at lunchtime, picking Henry up from school at 3pm and then making them dinner. Oh no, far too easy a day! I decided I also wanted to make sugarpaste flowers for some of the cupcakes, this despite the fact that the customer had told me that she didn't want the cupcakes to be too girly (hence the lilac buttercream instead of, say, pink). My mum had rung and asked me to make cupcakes for Saturday evening and kindly matched the flavours I was already baking and as I always baked too many cakes in case of decorating disasters, I decided that I'd take a few to the school fayre on Saturday afternoon.

I have a note on my website that says that the minimum order is 12 so that I don't end up getting loads of annoying orders for three or four, unfortunately it doesn't specify how many flavours you can choose, which still leads to orders like the one above where I had to make four of each flavour. I really must work out a firm but polite way of asking people to limit their flavours to two per dozen (or if you like, a minimum of six cakes per flavour).

Anyhoo, I finally finished decorating the cakes on Friday night after a brief respite to watch the previous night's Curb Your Enthusiasm and eat a rather nice Chinese Takeaway (thank you the Magic Wok of Northwood!). I ended up taking the ones above to my mum's house. As I mentioned previously my customer didn't want her cakes too girly and Simon didn't think the school cake stall would let me put a few business cards next to my cakes so I wasn't going to waste the fancy ones on them. So it was left to my family to coo over my flowers. (Oh, and I can't take all the credit for them - the idea of decorating the centre of the cakes was 'borrowed' from a fellow cupcaker, but she's in the Bristol/Bath area and I'm in NW London, so we're not competitors.)