Valentine's Day Cupcakes

First of all, Happy Valentine's Day! What better time to bake something yummy than on the most romantic day of the year? I say that as though I actually need an excuse to bake.... I actually baked these earlier in the week so that I could get these baked and tasted in time for this post on Valentine's Day.

I was recently sent a lovely selection of cake decorating products from Bakers Toolkit. Some of you may recognise the very pretty branding/packaging as this is the business set up by Luisa Zissman, the runner up of The Apprentice in 2013. 

Bakers Toolkit stems from a love of baking and they specialise in professional baking and cake decorating products at affordable prices. There is a wide selection of products including food colouring, edible glitter, pearl beads, and ready-to-roll icing. 

I love cake decorating but I always end up buying the same old products from the supermarket because, let's face it, there isn't much choice. With Bakers Toolkit, you can pretty much get everything that you would need to make amazing looking cakes all in one place. The only thing that would top it all off for me is if they did flavourings as well. 

As I have quite a few products to get through, I'll be bringing you all a couple of Baker's Toolkit posts throughout the next few weeks. I've been doing a lot baking posts recently and I hope you all like these alongside my usual posts.

For today's bake, I used Edible Hearts*, Pink Sugar Sand*, Dark Purple Pearl Beads*, and Edible Lilac Cupcake Glitter* to decorate my cupcakes. I stuck to pinks and purples to make my cakes look more romantic. 

Et voila! A lovely batch of cupcakes! Okay, they don't look as romantic as I imagined they'd be but I'm still working on my decorating skills. It's amazing what some pretty cake decorations can do though. 

This was one of the more Valentine's looking cakes decorated with pink sugar sand and edible hearts. I love how princess-y this looks as well The sugar sand tasted incredible, it gave the buttercream icing a really crunchy texture. A little baking tip though, best to decorate as you ice. I made the mistake of taking ages to ice and by the time I added the sugar sand, the icing had already started to harden. The sugar hearts were a bit easier to just push onto the icing and they can definitely make any cake look instantly girly. 

The dark purple pearl beads really stood out and it's actually one of my favourite colours. I find that it's quite difficult to get hold of purple sugar beads on the high street.  

My favourite product so far is definitely the lilac edible glitter. I have never used edible glitter before but I love it already! It looks so pretty and magical. It takes a little while to get used to it, I think I put too much glitter in some places and not enough in others but hopefully I'll do a better job next time! It also adds a nice crunch to the icing, although not as much as the sugar sand does. Bakers Toolkit offers a vast selection of glitter colours and I'm determined to own them all at some stage! 

I'm really pleased with how these have turned out and I've already got a few ideas as to what I'm going to do for my next baking adventure!

Happy Valentine's Day!