Gloverly Cupcakes

In 1957 our Grandpa, Alf Denning, opened a hardware shop on the Bristol Road in Northfield, Birmingham. It was called Denning’s Hardware and sold everything from a single nail, to wheelbarrows. As kids we often used to visit the shop when we went up to Birmingham to see our grandparents. I remember running round the shop with the sticker gun and using it to “price” ourselves! It’s been a long time since he ran the shop, but Denning’s is still going strong on the Bristol Road, so it seemed fitting to making him some hardware-themed biscuits for his 90th birthday last weekend. I was really pleased when I found a toolkit cookie cutter set (although they turned out to be smaller than I thought!). The biscuits were quite quick to make and decorate – the packaging took a bit longer. I made some labels, based on the colours of the sign I remember seeing outside the shop. I used cake pop bags to package each tool in – even they were a bit big, so I folded one side over. I stapled the labels to the top of the bags and then punched a hole in the top so they could be displayed like packets are in shops (although I realised afterwards that I didn’t have anything suitable to hang them on).