Gloverly Cupcakes

Last year I made my friend Ro a birthday cake. It was huge. So, this year when she invited me to her 30th birthday celebrations, I asked her if I could make her a giant birthday cake again. Her response was “that is possibly the silliest question I’ve ever heard”. In the end though, it wasn’t as big as the previous year – I think it would have been hard to beat it!

I realised I’d only have time to do something fairly simple so I made a plain chocolate cake and some chocolate cupcakes (from the recipe here) on the Friday night. The plan was to get up early on the Saturday morning before we went for a walk and make the buttercream and ice the cake. However, I didn’t buy any butter the night before – how did I forget that buttercream contains butter?!

Ro is Welsh so I decided to make her a Welsh flag cake. For the decoration, I rolled out some white fondant icing and cut out a Welsh dragon by hand with a knife and then painted it with red food colouring. It’s probably easy if you’ve got a template or Welsh dragon cookie cutter to cut it out using that but I gave my cutter to my sister so I had to go for the free-style option!

Once I’d bought some butter after our walk, I decided that I wanted the buttercream to be white so that I could keep half white and colour half green. Normal chocolate buttercream wouldn’t work and I didn’t want to do vanilla, so I chose to make a white chocolate cream cheese buttercream – it was delicious (recipe to follow soon when I’ve made it again to perfect it).

I covered exactly half the cake in white icing and smoothed it using a palette knife. I then carefully spread green buttercream on the other half. Using the palette knife, starting where the white buttercream started and moving round the white side first, I ran it up from the bottom to the top of the cake to create lines all the way round. I then used the same technique on the top, creating lines from the outside to the centre. To finish it off I placed the Welsh dragon in the middle.

To ice the cupcakes I used a new dual piping bag and nozzle set (from Lakeland) which Father Christmas gave me for Christmas – I filled one half of the bag with white icing and one with green and then piped a swirl on top of each cupcake. I wasn’t going to make mini dragons to go on top of each one so I bought Smarties to go on top… I had to open loads of tubes to get enough red ones! I think I’ll have to find something to do with the other colours before I eat them all….