Nuts about Iron Cupcake

So you may have read that Iron Cupcake has been cancelled next month. I and many other Iron Cupcake fans are hoping its just a holiday until Samantha, aka the Caked Crusader wants to come back as even after only baking twice for the event it has left a little cupcake shaped hole in my month.

As soon as I saw that the theme for July was "nuts and seeds" I got my thinking cap on. I first thought of something more classy like a rosewater and pistachio cupcake, similar to the beautiful one on the cover of Vegan Cupcakes Take over the World, however I couldn't ignore my one love in the nut world - peanut butter. I LOVE it. Adore it. Can't think of life without it. So before the winners were even announced I'd asked Ann Arbor Dennis (who was with me at the comp) to bring me some bags of Reese's peanut butter cups back from his trip home later this month as I was 99% sure I was going to use them in some way for my July entry.

Thanks to The Bleeding Heart Bakery for use of their Elvis photo

My thought was something along the lines of the Elvis cupcake from my newly acquired, and awesome, book Who you callin' cupcake by the owners of The Bleeding Heart Bakery in Chicago, Michelle and Vinny Garcia. The Elvis cupcake is a peanut butter, banana and bacon cupcake - except I was planning just to do a banana and peanut butter cupcake as I've had a bacon cupcake and quite frankly never need to try another. My plan was to top them with Reeses peanut butter cups, then I saw this

Thanks to Confessions of a Cookbook Queen for use of their photo and for such cuteness!

on the Confessions of a Cookbook Queen blog and I had a bit of an oh.my.god moment. A peanut butter cup covered in frosting to make a little mini cupcake - perfect as toppers for a peanut butter cupcake!

My other cupcake idea was something a bit adventurous for me, due to the sugarpaste topper. Something I've never done before. However I thought I'd share it with you incase you are and you fancy giving this cute topper a go!

First up was my other idea for a cupcake. I thought of candy/sweets I like with nuts in and the two contenders were Starbar (one of my favourite chocolate bars ) and Turtles

which I tried when in New York - yummy caramel chocolaty pecan goodness. I have several recipes for Turtle cupcakes in my cookbooks (including one yet again in Who you callin' cupcake), but if you fancy giving it a go and haven't got a recipe you could try this one from Bakers Royale - doesn't it look fabulous!

Thanks to Bakers Royale for the use of their photo - Chocolate Turtle Cupcake

My plan was to attempt to to top the turtle cupcakes with turtle toppers using the tutorial from Cake Journal - although I'm not sure they'd look quite as cute as these!

Thanks to Cake Journal for use of the Turtle photo

Alas now that the competition has been cancelled I wont be making either of these for the other Iron Cupcakers but I think I'm going to give the non-bacon version of the Elvis cupcakes a go, with the Reese's peanut butter toppers just to see if they taste as good as I imagine they will do!

I do hope Iron Cupcake is back soon as I have so many ideas and I love baking - it would be a shame not to be able to bake for others and also a shame if we lost such a fun competition from the London cupcake scene!