how to bake and blog about your Easter cupcakes

For Easter this year I made some vanilla cupcakes decorated with chocolate mini eggs. Nothing groundbreaking, but very satisfying and tasty. 

As vanilla cupcakes are probably the most blogged creation on the planet and I was baking these during the day in good light instead of the evening, I thought I'd write up a different style of blog post: a fun and silly What Do You Make Of My Cake"how to" special!

First, find all your ingredients and artfully arrange them around some daffodils/narcissus/lilies. It's Spring after all!

Take an action shot of yourself pouring, whipping or mixing. You're not a real food blogger unless you do that. Brownie points (mmmm brownies...) if you're handling a DSLR camera one handed.

Photograph your cupcakes before they go into the oven. Show everybody how luscious your cake batter looks. Don't show them your finger dipped in the batter. Nobody needs to see you greedily scraping the bowl like a child.

Whilst your cupcakes are in the oven, take a seat and have a cuppa. And a custard cream.

And marvel at your ability to accidently colour coordinate with your pinny. As the cool kids would say, Like. A. Boss.

Take your cupcakes out the oven and let them cool on a wire rack. Admire your awesome choice of cupcake cases.

Mix together your icing of choice (making sure you create a sufficient mess in the kitchen with the icing sugar) and pipe on some bad ass swirls with a Wilton 1M tip. Only the best cake bloggers use 1M tips ;)

Decorate your beautiful cupcakes with edible butterfies, pink sprinkles and mini eggs. Mini eggs are compulsory as it's Easter and you cannot blog an Easter bake without them.

Take an artsy photograph from a jaunty angle. Ooh yeah!

And for your Easter cupcake blog post you must also include at least one photograph with a little fluffy chick, kitsch bunny ornament or an adorable chicken basket. I've opted for the chicken basket. Awwww!

And finally, eat a cupcake! You've worked hard baking them, so you deserve it. Don't forget to take a cross section photograph though. You want to show off that fluffy texture.

And that's it! 

On a more serious note, this was the first time I have ever used vanilla bean paste (ooh I'm turning fancy!) and I really liked it. I wasn't sure how much I should add to the mixture, as it seemed pretty potent, so feel free to add more if you really want a punchy vanilla flavour as mine was quite subtle. I really like that you can see flecks of vanilla bean running through the batter and icing.

I've also come to the conclusion that I prefer the flavour of slightly salted butter in my icing. I know the majority of recipes say to use unsalted, but personally I find it a bit bland. What do you use in your icing? Am I an unhealthy rebel?

To make the icing, tip all the icing ingredients into a bowl and mix together for a good 5 minutes until light, fluffy and smooth. Once the cupcakes are cool you can either pipe your icing on using a bag and nozzle or spread on with a palette knife.

Since I'm having fun with my Easter post today I thought I'd send it over to this month's Easter themed Calendar Cakes Challenge hosted by Dollybakes. Feel free to join in with the fun!