We celebrated Hamish's 2nd birthday with a picnic BBQ at Clareville beach. After the torrential downpour of the week before we were lucky with the weather. It was such a beautiful day.

The kiddies had a wonderful time playing in the water and digging in the sand. Clareville beach is a great spot for an outing. Pity it's so far away!

Sarah and Duncan had requested no gifts but I hate to turn up empty handed. In lieu of a gift I made Bakerella's Cookies and Cream cupcakes. Unfortunately, I only had time to make 12 cupcakes. Andrew pointed out that there wasn't going to be enough to go around especially if there were lots of people there. Andrew was right, of course. There were about 20 kids there and with all the parents, 12 cupcakes just weren't going to cut it.

So I made an executive decision. The cupcakes were for the adults. In my opinion, cupcakes are totally wasted on children as they generally just lick the icing off the top and leave the cake bit behind. The kids enjoyed Sarah's colourful and tasty train cake and the cupcakes were distributed amongst the adults. There still weren't enough for all the adults. I need to be a better sharer.


Happy 2nd Birthday Hamish!

More photos (slideshow) on Flickr.

So, back to the M&Ms. I volunteered to make Clare's birthday cake as I had a bit of pinspiration bookmarked which I was itching to try. It was a number cake covered in M&Ms, created by Martha Stewart.

I cheated on the cake bit by going with a gluten-free chocolate cake and vanilla cake box mix. I had thought about trying out a couple of gluten-free cake recipes which I had pinned. I decided against this as I wasn't sure how much these cakes would rise. Gluten-free cakes are often quite dense and flat. I thought it would look funny if the two numbers were different heights.

October was breast cancer awareness month and Mars were selling pink and white M&Ms to raise money. I also stumbled across State of Origin M&Ms which are light blue and dark blue in colour. I was so happy to find some unusually coloured M&Ms I ended up buying 2kg of them, which in hindsight was overkill. But as I was going to be covering a cake with a pattern I didn't want to run out of a colour halfway through. I only ended up using about a third of the M&Ms... oops!

On Saturday evening I iced the cakes with butter cream (half a kilo of butter and a kilo of icing sugar!) and then covered them with M&Ms. Andrew helped with the decoration as it was getting late. We finished the Zero on Saturday evening and then decorated the Three the next morning during Evie's nap.

I found out the hard way that M&Ms do not refrigerate well. When I took the Zero out of the fridge in the morning the dark blue M&Ms had all discoloured. I replaced most of these dodgy looking M&Ms. I know they tasted fine because I ate a few of them as I took them off the cake (Mmm M&Ms and butter cream icing for breakfast). So if you want a pretty cake you shouldn't put it in the fridge.

Happy Birthday Clare! Hope you enjoyed your cake as much as I enjoyed making it.

More photos (slideshow) on Flickr.

This is what our Saturday night involved this weekend. Sorting 2kg of M&Ms into separate colours.

Not for eating though. More on what we used them for later.

I can't seem to host a gathering without baking cupcakes. So after my Halloween efforts I started up my Kitchenaid again and whipped up some Melbourne Cup themed cupcakes.

My original idea was to recreate the race using cupcakes and horsie cupcake toppers. I had grand plans of 24 cupcakes with cupcake toppers showing the colours of each horse and jockey in the race. I even wanted to make a finishing post and fence out of fondant. Of course, ultimately I didn't have time for these pipe dreams.

I ended up making 15 chocolate cupcakes. I iced these with green butter cream using my special "grass" tip. I made cupcakes toppers by meshing horse clipart and jockeys from the form guide. I only had time to do two different jockeys. I went with Red Cadeaux and Niwot cause their silks were pretty.

So not the fantabulous idea that I originally had but in the end not totally unfortunate looking. And they were taaaaaaaasty. That's all that matters really.

Now that I'm on uni break I've got more time for fun stuff. Yay! I couldn't pass up a chance to make Halloween cupcakes. Especially as Sarah and Duncan gave me a great book, Zombie Cupcakes, to use as inspiration. After seeing Not Quite Nigella's Haunted House cupcakes, I knew that I wanted to try them out too.

I think they turned out pretty well. The cake bit is gluten-free vanilla cupcakes. The tops are yellow coloured fondant decorated with black food colouring. The decorations were a Wilson team effort. Andrew is a much better artist than me so he drew the haunted houses using a food colouring pen. I then completed the pictures (by colouring in between the lines. I'm so clever!).

One mishap. The black food colouring didn't dry properly on the cupcake toppers so everyone who ate them ended up with black lips (oops!). Not sure what I need to do to make the colouring set.