Foodie Friday: Jubilee Cupcakes

Whoaaaa it's been ages since I did a Foodie Friday post. Oops! Today is a special one to celebrate the Queen's upcoming Jubilee. A lot of people are having street parties, so if you're stuck for ideas of what to bring, I thought I'd provide a relatively quick and easy - but totally delicious - suggestion: Jubilee cupcakes!

I found this recipe somewhere on the Internet a couple of years ago but can't remember where. I've tried lots of different recipes and this is definitely my favourite, it makes the cakes so light and fluffy. It makes about 20 cupcakes, depending on the size of the cases you use. Speaking of cake cases, I found some Union Jack and crown cases in Lakeland recently which I highly recommend to make your cakes look even more Jubilicious!

Ingredients:

For the sponge
80g unsalted butter, softened
280g caster sugar
240g plain flour
1 tbsp baking powder
Pinch of salt
240ml milk
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
2 large eggs

For the icing
250g icing sugar
80g unsalted butter
25ml milk
1/4 tsp vanilla extract
Red, white and blue sprinkles

1. Preheat the oven to 190C/375F and line two cupcake tins with cupcakes.
2. Whisk together the butter and sugar until perfectly combined - it should look a bit like breadcrumbs. Add the flour, baking powder and salt and mix well.
3. Put the milk, eggs and vanilla extract in a jug and mix together by hand. With your whisk on a low speed, add three quarters of this to the dry ingredients and combine thoroughly, then add the rest of the mixture and whisk on a medium setting until smooth. It will be quite runny, more like a batter than your usual cake mix, but this is what makes the cakes so fluffy!
4. Spoon the cake mixture into the cases so they're about two-thirds full. Bake for about 20 minutes in the oven - but keep a close eye on them! If the cakes feel springy when you touch them, then they're ready. Leave to cool.
5. In a clean bowl, whisk the icing sugar and butter together until they look sandy (just take my word for it). Add the milk and vanilla extract, and whisk until the icing is light and fluffy. I usually like to do this for at least a couple of minutes. At this point you can add food colouring - red or blue, perhaps? - if you want to, but I chose to leave mine white.
6. Using a knife (or a palette knife, if you have one), spread the icing on the top of the cakes. Finally, add your sprinkles or whatever else you want to use to decorate your cakes (I used red, white and blue sugar sprinkles from Lakeland). I also added little Jubilee flags to each one.
7. Put your feet up and eat one of your delicious cupcakes - for, ahem, quality control purposes, of course!

Topshop War Paint

Just a quick post today to show you a fun, summery colour. Topshop War Paint is a bright red/coral shade that is almost, but not quite, neon. I wore this a few times last summer before I started blogging - it looks especially great as a pedicure colour. The formula is good; two coats for full coverage, although I did an unnecessary third coat.

As you probably know, the Queen's Diamond Jubilee is only a few days away so on Friday I'll be doing a themed Foodie Friday post, and on Sunday, Monday and Tuesday I'll be showing you themed manicures! I'm really looking forward to it, and I hope you enjoy them! :)

Grey & Turquoise Leopard Print Mani

I was awfully slow to jump on the leopard print manicure bandwagon, but now that I have - I never want to get off it! They're so easy and really eye-catching. I got a ton of compliments when I wore the one I'm showing you today.

I started with two coats of Rimmel London Grey Matter. It's a medium grey - a true grey, with no hint of beige or anything like that. It's really clean and fresh-looking, and it looks great on its own, too. I then randomly blobbed on China Glaze Turned Up Turquoise, a neon turquoise with a gorgeous shimmer (FYI: it's more green-toned than it appears in my photos). It's soooo pretty! Finally, I used my trusty black Models Own Wah Nail Art Pen to draw round the blobs, and covered with a top coat. I really like how this turned out, particularly the contrast between the grey and the neon.

To see my previous leopard/cheetah print manicures, you can find them here and here.

Have you jumped on the leopard manicure bandwagon? If not, why not?!

The Battle of the Cornflower Blues

I try to only buy polishes that are dissimilar to each other, but I noticed the other day that I seem to have accrued several cornflower blues that all look alike. Oops! I thought it might be interesting to see how they stack up against each other. Without further ado, the contenders are:

From left to right:
Nails Inc Chalk Farm
Rimmel London Aqua Cool
China Glaze Electric Beat
Essie Lapis of Luxury

I used three coats of each polish. Only Lapis of Luxury actually needed the third. In terms of application, I'd say Chalk Farm and Aqua Cool were the best and Electric Beat was the worst - but to be honest they were all pretty great so I'm just being picky here!

As for colour, it's immediately obvious that Chalk Lane is darker and perhaps more of a periwinkle than cornflower blue because it has a touch of purple in it. Although Aqua Cool and Lapis of Luxury look very slightly different in my photos, in real life they're identical - Electric Beat is a touch lighter than these two.

I hope this helps anyone who's on the hunt for a pretty cornflower blue. Do any of you have several very similar colours in your stash?

The Many Faces of Claude

Now that the sun has come out, I decided to give my hamster Claude his first taste of the great outdoors (aka my back garden). I don't think he knew what to make of the grass at first, but he soon got over it and scampered about happily. I actually managed to take a few decent photos of him, which was a pleasant surprise because he doesn't usually stay still long enough for me to do this!

Cautious Claude

Intent Claude

Curious Claude

Gormless Claude

Nicole by OPI Kim-pletely in Love

I would just like to state for the record that I am not a Kardashian fan. I have never seen the TV show and I don't read gossip magazines. But I couldn't resist buying a polish from their collection with Nicole by OPI because the colour looked so pretty and girly. Kim-pletely in Love is a pale pink polish with blueish microglitter. It's very sheer - I used four coats for the photos below and you can still see my nail line - but the application itself was good and it dried very quickly.

When I showed my mum these photos, her only comment was that my fingers looked really wrinkly! Thanks, Mum.

Topshop Louder with Models Own Ibiza Mix

I went up to London last Tuesday for a bit of culture and retail therapy. In the morning I visited the Turner Inspired: In the Light of Claude exhibition at the National Gallery, because the historic house I work at loaned one of their Turners for it. It was really interesting. I know quite a bit about the artist Turner, but very little about Claude (although given that he shares a name with my hamster, you think I'd know more!). After the exhibition I endured the Tube and went to Westfield to see the new(ish) Models Own stand.

Isn't it pretty?! The staff were really friendly (one of them complimented my nails, which made me happy!) and they had a great range of colours. And they don't have tills, they have iPads that act as tills! SO COOL. I actually ended up only getting one Models Own polish, but I got six others by various brands. Hmmm. Only seven. That's quite restrained for me.

Today I'm showing you the Models Own polish layered over another one I got in London, Topshop Louder. Louder is a bright tangerine creme. It has a great formula, covering in two easy coats.

In all honestly, I don't know what possessed me to buy this. It's a nice colour, but orange/tangerine does not go with my colouring at all - it needs someone with darker skin than mine to really pull it off. To see if I could save it, I layered my new Models Own polish, Ibiza Mix, over it. Ibiza Mix is multicoloured large and small hexagonal glitter in a clear base:

I went to the Models Own stand with the express intention of getting this polish, but now I have it my feelings on it are mixed. On the one hand, it looks pretty cool and it did make this manicure slightly more bearable for me. On the other hand...the formula was rubbish. The glitter was sparse - this is two coats, so full coverage wasn't an option - and the clear base was very runny. It kind of felt like they'd just dumped a load of random glitter in a bottle of clear nail polish. Maybe I got a dud bottle...?

What do you think of this combination? Are you hopping on this year's tangerine bandwagon?