Tea and cake

My brother-in-law gave me a mini Hummingbird Bakery cookbook for Christmas, as well as the prettiest pink cupcake cases.

I loved the look of the book instantly. Although I've made a lot of cupcakes in my time, I'd never got on to any flavourings more exotic than rosewater, and I'd made up my own techniques, using a classic sponge recipe which is perfect for a fairy cake but slightly too heavy for a cupcake. The book has ginger cupcakes and lavender cupcakes and the technique for capturing the more unusual flavours (soaking the ginger or lavender in a little milk for hours and cooking with the milk) looks transferrable. It also has some lovely looking savoury muffins I'll try later in the year when it's too warm for boiled eggs and soldiers for breakfast.

But I only got a chance to cook from the book this weekend.

This was baking on impulse, with ingredients from the store cupboard and the local supermarket, so I decided to go for the lemon cupcakes for ease. The Husband also asked for a baking lesson at the same time, so we baked together, in our tiny kitchen.

The process wasn't without hitches - without thinking I added the lemon zest that was meant to go in the icing to the cake mix and so substituted lemon juice for the milk in the icing, which worked nicely, but perhaps gave a sharper flavour. The book said to fill the cases two thirds full - but there wasn't enough cake mix for this, so I only filled eight cases. But then the cakes rose so much they were a little too high, so actually, the recipe would have been enough for 12, rather than eight.

And as it was The Husband's first time with food colouring, the cakes looked rather like someone had stuck a canary in a blender, rather than a nice subtle pastel yellow.

But the hitches weren't the book's fault - and the cakes were delicious with a cup of tea and the Sunday papers. So delicious, they're now all gone. Oops.