Away with the fairy cakes...

Pretty Fairy Cakes (Makes 12)

Babbled Intro:
This was a very exciting experiment. Thanks to my aunty Heather, I now am the proud owner of edible glitter - how cool is that? So thought I'd make some cakes to celebrate and thought better play it safe and just make fairy cakes with some butter icing. Ok, so then thought, let's try make them a bit interesting so the result after much pondering was jam filled fairy cakes! Thanks to goggle, I researched how to do this and most people syringe the jam into the middle of the cooked cakes like you would with jam filled doughnuts. This sounds too hardcore for me so I experimented by putting 1 tsp of cake batter, 1 tsp jam and then 1tsp of batter on top and enclosed the jam before putting the cakes into the oven.

Ingredients:
For the cake batter:
125g butter, softened
125g caster sugar
2 large eggs
125g self raising flour
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
2 tbsp milk
12 tsp strawberry jam

For the topping:
125g butter, softened
3 tbsp icing sugar, sifted
1 tsp vanilla extract
Splash of pink food colouring
Sprinkle of edible glitter

Method:

• Preheat oven to 200c. Line a 12 hole tin with paper cake cases.
• Put all the ingredients for the batter (Apart from the jam) into a food mixer and process until creamy and light.
• Spoon 1 heaped teaspoon of mixture into each paper case (Try and spread so it covers base of case). 
• Then put 1 teaspoon of jam over the cake mixture, cover this with another teaspoon of cake mixture - trying to enclose the jam in between.

• Bake for 15-20 mins until golden and when the cakes spring back when you gently push the middle.

• Leave these to cool.
• Make the butter icing by mixing the butter with the sifted icing sugar, then add the vaniall extract and a bit of colouring (You won't need much).
• Spread onto the cooled cakes and the sprinkle the glitter over them all.

My Conclusion / Review:
Voilà - it worked and the food colouring with the butter icing went a beautiful coral colour. The overall look and taste was something that would sit nicely on a cake stand at a fairy tea party. The mistake I did make was to leave them in the fridge over night as I think it took away the lovely fluffy texture of the cakes.

James's verdict:
"8/10 - The cake mixture suffered from being the fridge over night, we'll have to leave them out next time. They still went down a storm at work."