Bake-a-long part 3

Finally it's time to decorate the cakes!

Coconut Cupcakes with Lemon Frosting

For the cupcakes frosting I've cheated and used ready made buttercream but you can make it easily mixing 50g of butter to 200g of icing sugar, this will cover about 12 cakes so if you need to alter the recipe to make sure you have enough. If you want your buttercream softer add in a tablespoon of milk. To the buttercream mix I've add some lemon zest to give it a lemon tang. You could add the juice if you preferred but swap that for the milk so as not to make your buttercream runny.

Pop a teaspoon full of buttercream on the cake and smooth it around with a butter knife. If you want to be all fancy you can use a piping bag but I think they look just as good spooned on.

For a final touch add a little more grated lemon zest then add in your union jack cupcake picks from your Quirky Kit.

Yum!

Red, White and Blue Cakes

To make this frosting make the same basic buttercream mixture. Melt the white chocolate but leave a small amount to one side for decorating. Mix the melted chocolate into the buttercream. If the buttercream stiffens add an extra tablespoon of milk.

Add some of the white chocolate buttercream to each of the little cake layers then stack them up on top of one another to make the red, white and blue layers.

Cover the whole of the little cakes in the buttercream. I also rolled mine in some of the leftover coconut just on the edges. Grate the leftover white chocolate on top of the cakes then add the red edible glitter. You can put them in cake cases if you want to or pop them on a platter or plate. Once the frosting has hardened, (it will form a nice shell as the chocolate sets) they're quite easy to move around.

 When your friends and family dig in they'll get a fun surprise!

 Yum, stripy cake!

If you didn't want to conceal the colours just decorate the tops of the cakes. This one just has a bit of buttercream and coconut on top.

There's the cakes done!

If you have made the sheet cakes and have some leftover bits of cake from cutting out the circles you can mix the leftovers with some of the buttercream and make cake pops too!

Squidge the cake and buttercream together and roll into balls. Roll the balls into coconut.

Add lolly sticks to the balls and pop them in the freezer to harden. Once they're firm roll them in chocolate and leave it to set.

You could also use your leftover bits of cake to make a fun red, white and blue trifle using them as the bottom cakey layer.

Now the cakes are done. Next we need to make some decorations!
Grab your kit leftovers for some fun party decorating ideas coming up later.

xx Leo