Teachers Fairy Cakes.

Good morning and welcome to today! Today being the last day of school for my children. 

I have sent them in today bearing gifts for their awesome teachers. 

The have taken the jars, which I showed you a couple of days ago. Instead of filling them with flowers as I intended, the kids decided they would much rather fill them with sweets! So we did. 

I also baked some vanilla fairy cakes yesterday and iced them with pink vanilla buttercream. I didn't do a photo step-by-step but I do have the recipe to give you.

You'll need:

175g butter/margarine

175g sugar

175g self raising flour

3 eggs

1tsp vanilla extract/flavouring.

For the Buttercream:

500g icing sugar

170g butter/margarine

few drops food colouring

1tsp vanilla extract flavouring.

** Preheat your oven to 170*C and line a bun tray with paper cases.**

Step 1: In your stand mixer, cream together the butter and sugar until fluffy and light in texture/appearance.

Add your eggs and flour in an egg, flour, egg, flour pattern. Keep your mixer on a slow to medium speed otherwise you risk disappearing under a cloud of flour dust!

Finally add your teaspoon of vanilla, mix well and divide into paper cases. Bake for 15 minutes or until a cocktail stick comes out clean.

While your fairy cakes are baking, you can start mixing up the butter cream.

In a clean bowl cream the butter a little to soften it then slowly start adding your icing sugar. As with the flour, make sure you do this slowly as it's messy if you don't!

Also add in a few drops of your chosen colour and your vanilla extract/flavouring. 

Beat it all together on a medium speed, your aim is to get the icing to softly hold it's shape when you remove the beater. 

When your fairy cakes are baked and cooled, prepare your piping bag. I always use a Wilton 1M nozzle but a wide star tip would be just as effective. Scoop your buttercream into your bag and pipe lovely spirally swirls on your cupcakes. 

With fairly soft icing I find it's easier to start in the middle of your cupcake and cover it in a flat spiral to form a platform for your 'peaked' spiral. 

I hope that makes sense, I wish I'd taken pictures...

Decorate with whatever you fancy, or not at all! These cupcakes looked equally lovely with no sugar butterflies on them.

Do you see the boxes the cupcakes are in?

These are cereal boxes cut to size and wrapped in gift wrap. I wanted to keep costs down for the gifts this year and this worked brilliantly. I tied some pretty yellow ribbons around it too.

The cupcake dividers you see in the boxes are actually folded napkins. 

The sweets inside the jars are just round boiled sweets - sparkling fruits I think they're called. I found them in my baking cupboard, so that was another saving.

The cupcake that's standing alone was supposed to be for the school bus driver but as we were heading out of the door it got dropped on it's head! 

Sorry Mr Bus Driver.

I have no idea whether the cupcakes made it school in one piece or not, I hope so. 

Thanks for reading, I have some exciting news to share later today!

Lots of love,

Kaye xx