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Lea celebrated her birthday in advance, yesterday (Friday). Although her actual day will be on Monday, she won’t be in school as it will be a school holiday - Youth Day. Both girls will be home so I suppose as a family we can have a family celebration together on Monday. Instead of ordering the usual large cake for my girl, I decided to bake cupcakes. I’ve seen how messy cake cutting in class/canteen can be and how much food is wasted at the end. I decided to let the kids have a cup cake each and if they don’t want to eat them in the school, they can always bring it home along with the goodie bag of treats.

I made them chocolate cupcakes with Sofiya helping out. In fact she did most part of it because I was out getting the last minute cocoa powder on the day we baked. She had done a full recipe of it and was starting on the second batch. Yes we used full recipe twice because my cake beater may not take the weight of 2x the full recipe done at once. Each recipe yielded about a dozen cupcakes or more, depending on per cup weight. Sofiya had turned up the oven a little more higher than needed to or the tray was placed too high or something along the line because  our cupcakes cracked slightly at the top. Or perhaps there was too much baking powder. I know for one thing, I needed to get a new kitchen weighing machine cos this one shows a different reading for the same item if weighed twice.

So I decided to make some butter cream to pipe at the top. But along the way, I thought a sugar paste would be better to cover the cracks. So my butter cream was converted into butter sugar paste. We used th cookie cutter and made shapes and sprinkled the colourful decors and I brushed with a little of sugar syrup because my fondant was drying, and it might roll off! Then I stuck on little marshmallow kebabs and that’s it!

I packed them into little cups for convenience. This way, I don’t have to get a large container to store the cupcakes and I don’t have to worry about transportation of them to the nursery school. The teachers were so delighted to see the cupcakes and asked all their teacher friends to come take a look. i quickly made excuses to leave as I didn’t like too much attention anyway..  And also, I wasn’t sure if they might think that is this a parent’s attempt to cut cost of buying a cake? Will they think that this parent baked some horrible looking cupcakes? To me, it was a little of each. Yes, I did too want to cut cost from buying commercial cakes because I used to spend as much as $60 - $80 for a large cake for a class. And I see alot of cake left at the end of the day. This time, I actually saved a lot cos I baked about 30 cakes for them, with extras for cleaners. I’m trying to be frugal too, no doubt about it.