If you're a cupcake fan you must know that yesterday was the start of the second Cupcake Week. The event, launched in 2009 by British Baker, was launched with an installation using 5000 cupcakes in Westfield Shopping Centre London, depicting the face of Olympic boxer James de Gale with cakes were baked by Lily Vanilli and organised by blogger Ms Cakehead. You can see pics on Ms Cakeheads blog. If this reminds you of something, it's quite similar to Zilly Rosen's Obama cupcake mosaic.
It's two days into Cupcake Week and I've not yet scoffed a single cupcake so thought I'd do a round up of some of my recent(ish) cupcake purchases instead.
First up are some disappointing lemon cupcakes (top pic) I baked from the Primrose Bakery cookbook. The cakes were rather dry and didn't have much of a lemony taste too them. Instead of their lemon frosting I opted to make a white chocolate and lemon frosting using Green and Blacks white chocolate which tasted really nice but was waaaaay too runny for piping. Although I wasn't too impressed with them Manny seemed to enjoy them.
I've been a bit disappointed with the offerings on previous occasions however this time the cupcakes were fabulous. I had a banoffee cupcake which was very moist and incredibly flavoursome and unlike last time the frosting was tasty and not just buttery.
I got Manny an Oreo which he loved. I had gotten him an Oreo cupcake from here before and it was stale - this time it was moist, fresh and incredibly moreish. 
I also got a little red velvet mini cupcake which was one of the better red velvets I've had. Alas the greed of not just settling for one cupcake resulted in my banoffee cupcake looking gorgeous on one side but like this...
on the other - alas my red velvet mini was rather unceremoniously shoved on top of my banoffee cupcake. The horror!Beneath the red velvet cupcake you can see my chocolate of choice, Hotel Chocolat's caramel Tiddly Pots - heaven in a polka dot pot.
Another weekend meant a trip to Paperchase which resulted in me buying another cupcake tote bag. I see it as being environmentally concious as buying cotton shopping bags means I don't have to use plastic ones. Manny see's it as another f*cking bag in the house. However it was too cute to resist and even he agreed I should buy it. 
I also got this cute little birthday card which sums up perfectly how you should spend your birthday. Although I'd add and lashings of mojitos too!
After our trip to Paperchase (and a mornings boxing for Manny, a morning of shopping and lounging in Starbucks with the Sunday papers for me) we couldn't resist popping in for a cupcake on our walk past Primrose. The last cake I had from Primrose was inedible, and as mentioned earlier in this post I had a disappointing lemon cupcake incident from their book however the cupcakes restored my Primrose faith as they were gorgeous. Manny got double chocolate (is anyone surprised by this?) and I had a strawberry and white chocolate which was moist and incredibly tasty with a lovely strawberry jam/compote in the middle.
The polka dot cases and cupcake boxes were bought on a recent trip to Sainsburys who have added loads to their baking range and seem to be embracing the home baking phenomenon. Wish they'd start stocking some decent extracts and colourings though instead of those horrid essences! They did have a baking promotion running with 1/3 off lots of baking essentials (I stocked up on tonnes of Doves flours) but I think that may have ended.
Finally on a trip to Tescos today I spotted these strawberry cupcake cones and couldn't get over how unappealing they looked, they also had some really vile looking whoopie pies that looked so unpleasant I can't imagine anyone buying them. There's a pic on my Twitpic page if you want to see them - sorry was trying to be surreptitious with my phone taking pics hence the quality!
Also in Tescos were these rather nice cupcake mugs which I felt would cheer up anyones morning cuppa. I didn't buy them though as I'm banned from purchasing crockery.
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