The Cupcake Conundrum

Does the running cancel out the cupcakes or do the cupcakes cancel out the running???

Team Little Legs has alot of money to raise, and this week I received the email equivalent of a kick up the backside from the fundraising manager at Tommy's. It was a reminder that half our fundraising total needs to be raised by Christmas, and of this £1250 I have currently only raised about £450. This is not an amount of money to be sniffed at, but I have only 10 weeks to make up the difference. To add to the pressure, it seems the whole world wants to do the London Marathon next year, so there are lots of people waiting in the wings to take my charity spot. So, we put on our collective thinking caps on, and then it came to me, CUPCAKES! After I had gone to the shop and eaten all the cupcakes I'd bought, I began to think we might have a go at baking some to sell. I have done a fair bit of baking in the past, how hard can it be? The answer to this question is Very. I had no idea how many nozzles, bags, icing recipes and cupcake recipes there are out there. The only way we are going to get to a vaguely professional standard is practise, practise. So, after I had done my long run (a very nice nine mile run in the beautiful autumn sunshine) Rebecca, Evie and I made our way to the kitchen.

Evie made a simple batch of vanilla cupcakes, while Rebecca couldn't resist whipping up a batch of chocolate. In the last week or so I have made some lovely recipes, including choc-orange and a truly scrumptious caramel cupcake, but for today's cakes we kept it simple. While the cakes were cooling we made a batch of icing and coloured it up. Evie picked pink, Rebecca a baby blue, while I opted for a dusky pink colour.



 I was really impressed by my ladies piping skills. As you can see Evie got stuck right in. I used a recipe I found on the internet that called for milk, but I found it a little runny. Even though the piping was not spectacular, we had an army of glitter and sprinkles to rectify the situation.

 



The girls were very happy with their creations and they certainly passed the taste test. I think that we will need a whole lot of practise before we get something that looks good enough to sell. I am a little worried however that having all these cupcakes in the house will spell bad news for my diet. Perhaps my running will cancel out the calories, but I cant help but think that it may be that having a house full of cupcakes may cancel out all the good work done by the running, only time will tell.

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