Sticky toffee salted caramel cupcakes

Last time my husband went away on business I did the shopping all by myself - never a good idea. That week the internet grocery shopping delivery consisted of bell peppers, padron peppers, roquito peppers, a jar of caramel and not much else. So I've had this caramel in the fridge for a while now and other than using as an amazing ice cream topping I haven't know what to do with it - until now!

When it comes to cupcakes I usually make a classic vanilla flavour, but my good friend Sarah is always more adventurous and I'm invariably impressed with the recipes she chooses from the Hummingbird Bakery Cake Days book. Hummingbird is absolutely my favourite bakery. Their cupcakes are always the lightest. I wanted to bake some cupcakes to take to a birthday party and choose these Sticky Toffee Cupcakes from the Cake Days book.

The sponge is flavoured with soft brown sugar and chopped dates that have been soaked and softened in boiling water. I went a bit off-piste with the icing and didn't follow the recipe as I already had some basic butter cream left over in the fridge from a previous cake. Essentially I just added a couple of enormous spoonfuls of the caramel and a little maldon salt to the plain butter cream to make a ridiculously tasty salted caramel butter cream. I quickly whizzed up some toffees in the blender and sprinkled the toffee dust over the top of the icing.

I've never really got the hang of impressive looking butter icing. It's just too soft a medium for me to have any control over. I do like the look of these - very homemade looking - but I don't think Hummingbird are going to invite me to join their team any time soon!

I still had plenty of the icing left over so today I decided to whip up another batch of the cake batter and use it to make this loaf - a loaf is so much easier to transport than cupcakes. This time I added a teaspoon of ground mixed spice to the batter hoping to give it a deeper, more autumnal flavour.

30th Birthday Cake

I baked this cake for my very good friend Matt's recent birthday.

I really need to buy another round 15cm cake tin as I keep having to bake the two layers in two separate batches! That's probably the reason I often bake a square cake instead of a round one! This cake was made with a four egg mixture (200g butter, 200g sugar, 4 eggs and 200g flour) so came out very tall at 10cm. I really like tall tiers as I think it makes them more special.

I usually struggle to think of ideas for cakes for men. So much of cake decorating is making pretty cakes that aren't really appropriate for guys. For my husband's last birthday I iced the tartan cake and used that for inspiration for this argyle pattern.

After applying the marzipan and sugarpaste I cut the diamonds out of more sugarpaste. A mix of sugarpaste and flower paste would probably have given a better finish as I would have been able to roll it thinner and it would have been less stretchy - but I've run out of flower paste at the moment so had to settle for the regular icing. The white lines were made with the tagliatelle pasta cutter. I made a template from the lettering on top by simply printing the characters onto A4 paper and cutting them out. I lay this on top of the icing and cut around with a sharp knife.