You won’t be surprised to hear that cupcakes featured heavily over my birthday. There were quite a number of cupcake cards, Mim gave me a 24 hole mini cupcake tin, and birthday celebration #1 was a feast of cupcakes in the park on Sunday afternoon.

Annabelle provided a veritable banquet of Hummingbirds:

Gill made glittery cakes while Claire baked fruit-filled beauties (got to get those vitamins in somewhere!) and I made a determined attempt at the title of Cupcake Queen, with three varieties. This was a feat of some organisational skill. Bearing in mind that I’d just spent seven days camping, I didn’t have time to bake the day before – so I baked them two weeks ahead, stuck them in the freezer and iced them on Saturday night. Brilliant forward planning, if I do say so myself.

I present to you: Red Velvet and Marshmallow cupcakes courtesy of the Hummingbird book alongside Brownie cupcakes (this recipe, put into cases & frosted).

Marshmallow cupcakes are things of beauty. I’ll let you into a secret, you get the gooey marshmallow centre by scooping out a little of the sponge and adding melted marshmallow. It’s a fabulous surprise when you bite into them and it helps when there’s bit of gooeyness in the frosting too. (They went down very well at church later that evening when I distributed the leftovers and made a number of new friends.)

As well as making fabulous cake, Claire created special cupcake bunting – instructing me to find a picnic spot ‘near small trees’ but not divulging why until she arrived. Thus we had a very beautiful corner of Regent’s Park in which to gorge ourselves on sugar. Oh, and she even had lovely cloth napkins to place the cakes upon – folded into lilies. Yes, lilies. The other friends were so intrigued by this that a demonstration was demanded and Annabelle suggested I film it, so here for your viewing pleasure, is a tutorial on turning napkins into water lilies:

Three favourite moments –
(i) “It’s like afternoon tea meets Blue Peter” (Absolutely true.)
(ii) “I’m so going to do this for my next dinner party!” (Oh Annabelle, I still can’t get over the fact that you’d had a dinner party, let alone that at your next one the napkins will be shaped like lilies!)
(iii) “It works better with the paper napkins” “Well, if you use stiff linen napkins it works even better…” (Sorry, was that just a paper versus linen napkin moment? Oh dear.)

I love my friends – even more than I love cake. Now, all I need to do is prepare some special karaoke numbers for birthday celebration #2 on Friday…