National Cupcake Week
I'll cut to the chase, I love cake. I love baking, I love buying and I love eating cake, pretty much any cake and my son is no different! In celebration of National Cupcake Week this week, (14th - 20th September), what better way to show our appreciation to the humble cuppy cake, than to bake a special super sweet batch together and gobble them all up (sorry diet) with the help of my very lucky family and friends.
We decided upon a basic chocolate sponge with a tasty vanilla frosting and sprinkles. Yum yum. When you're baking with a three year old boy, the key is too keep things simple and quick before they move onto something else! I love baking from scratch, but opted for a sponge mix this time and a pot of pre made frosting, easy peasy!
See he is actually very helpful! He loves counting out the cases and there he is doing the egg smash!
Preparation...
Helpy helper!
My little helper (A) loves baking, but his main job seems to be smashing eggs - which he finds hilarious, as well as tasting everything he possibly can. That's a kids job I suppose! We started off by getting all our baking gear ready, organisation is key after all! In other words if I don't organise myself it goes very very wrong and I end up nipping out for a box of pre made, shhh it's a secret!
What we used
- Chocolate sponge mix
- Hundreds & Thousands (sprinkles)
- 2 X Happy Egg Co Eggs
- OXO Good grips mixing bowl
- OXO Good grips cupcake corer
- Mixer
- Spoon
- Water
Whizzing the mix up super fast and our magic OXO bowl stays in place! Perfect - I think he would have buzzed it onto the floor otherwise!
As we had a new toy to play with, a little cupcake corer, we decided we would fill the cakes with frosting as well as top them, you can never have too much frosting! These sponge mixes are super easy to use, just tip into your mixing bowl, these OXO bowls are great as they have non slip bottoms so don't ride all over the worktop while you're mixing! We have a bigger one we use for bread too, really good. Crack in your eggs, add some water and blend! So easy my three year old can do it all alone, even if the walls do get a little splattered, it's all fun.
Baking!
15 delicious smelling minutes in the oven and they are baked, out they come onto the cooling rack. It's at this point you have the 'no not yet' battle with baby and toddler. It's at this point our batch went from 12 to 11, (chocolate cake covered) Baby 1, (weak willed) Mummy Nil.
Coring!
Once cooled we started coring our cakes! This was fun and A just wanted to eat the 'mini cakes' that came out the centre, I decided we would put cream in, then 're-plug' with the cake core, sorry kids! This was really easy to do as the corer acts like a little soft choppy syringe, A was a little heavy handed so I did most the coring. We smothered our frosting in, corked and covered in more frosting, sprinkles and even a couple of milky buttons, A's choice.
Tasting!
The flavoured core worked so well! You could totally hide it if you wanted too or make it more towered like ours. They aren't perfect looking but tasted amazing and were certainly a good nod to acknowledge the week of cup cake celebration! The super sweet frosting was so good and they were so easy to make, though we will possibly be a little more adventurous next time as A had a great time and these were super quick to make!
Totally mouthwatering cross section of our cored cakes - tasty! I took four to our lucky neighbours (to save me eating them all!) but we enjoyed the rest yesterday to celebrate this week.
Totally mouthwatering cross section of our cored cakes - tasty! I took four to our lucky neighbours (to save me eating them all!) but we enjoyed the rest yesterday to celebrate this week.
This bake was a practise run for A's fourth birthday party next month, as you can see he would give these and the cool new baking tools a big thumbs up!
Disclosure: We were sent an Oxo bowl and cake corer as well as a voucher for the eggs, for inclusion in this post. All words, pictures, thoughts and silliness are our own!