Baking: Hummingbird marshmallow cupcakes, and a way to carry them

Last week I travelled down for a meeting in our Newcastle office. I wanted to thank my colleagues there for helping me out a few weeks ago, and I’d vaguely promised to bake.

I decided to make the prettiest cupcakes I could, partly to show off a bit but mostly because it’s hard not to smile when about to bite into a super pretty cupcake with a mountain of icing.

I spotted the recipe for marshmallow cupcakes in my Hummingbird Bakery book and it looked perfect (I’m squeamish about copying it here because of copyright, but it’s here).

Until I remembered my boss is vegetarian, and a strict one – she wouldn’t touch the gelatine in marshmallows.

So I made half with the marshmallow – on the right, pictured – and added a couple of drops of red, suitable-for-veggies food colouring to the other half of the icing to make it pink.

But the other problem was how to get them down to Newcastle on the train in tact. I’d been thinking about this for a while after too many experiences baking pretty cup cakes for cake sales, and having them get squashed and ruined on the bus.

So I sent the Husband to Lakeland to buy me this.

 

It’s huge, and would be a pain if you had too much else to carry, but it does the job. It has an indented space for each cupcake, can also hold 24 mini ones or one big cake, and clips together sturdily. I have never attracted so many stares when walking through Waverley station as I did when I was carrying this and the cakes, and I think if our train had been delayed I would have had to fight off my fellow passengers.

The cup cake caddy didn't work perfectly - when I got on to the train, some toppled and had to be rearranged - but they all made it down in tact and it survived most things - getting on and off the bus for example - just not the mad rush for seats on the 8am train down to London!

The cupcakes were very well received in the office - a horde of very happy gannets descended - but my colleagues were also intrigued by the carrier itself and wanted to know where I got it. If the Newcastle branch of Lakeland has sold out, I'm sorry, it's my fault.