During the school holidays I often spend the day with my mum; we go shopping, we have lunch… we generally relax and chill out.  The other day we did just that, a wonder around a local market town, lunch sat outside in a pub garden followed by more shopping in our local city.

In our shopping centre there is a Lakeland shop… such a dangerous place for me to go!  For those of you not familiar with Lakeland – they have every piece of kitchenware you have ever thought of (and a few more besides!)  I can always find something when I go in and I’ve had to ban myself from looking at their website!  I’d been wanting an icing set for ages and they had a good selection.  My mum had an old set which had all rusted and I wanted a set that would last – so I decided to get this silicon set.  It definitely appealed that I could just take it apart and chuck it in the dishwasher, rather than all the fiddly cleaning with the old metal ones.

As we walked through the shopping centre we spied a cupcake stand which had some beautiful cake domes which were made from plastic.  I had originally wanted the cake dome from Nigella’s range, but I was scared of it.  Now I know that sounds faintly ridiculous, but it’s made of glass with a ceramic base and I am possibly the most accident prone person there is… let’s just say I (and anyone who knows me) didn’t hold out much hope for it lasting any length of time!  This meant I’d been looking for a clear plastic cake dome, which was proving to be a bit of a challenge because most of the ones I’d seen either looked really tacky or were really bad quality, or both!  I had to ask the owner of the stall where she had got hers from, so off we toddled to BHS and we were successful in our quest!

Now I’d got my cake dome and icing set I was keen to make something pretty to go in it!

I used this Chocolate Cupcake recipe from http://allrecipes.com//Recipe/chocolate-cupcakes/Detail.aspx.  I had to cook them for 20 minutes in my oven, keep checking them through the window if you have one!

For the frosting I used: 100g cream cheese, 200g icing sugar, 2.5ml peppermint essence, 2.5ml green food colouring.   I mixed it altogether and started playing with my icing set.

Unfortunately, they weren’t the most pretty attempt at icing a cupcake you’ve ever seen – I’m actually embarrassed to put a picture here, but the cake dome is pretty and actually helps to make them look ever so slightly better!

Oh well, they taste pretty good!  I’ll just have to try again!