Dr Oetker: Spring Time Baking

As some of you may know, I love baking cupcakes, mainly because I love decorating them afterwards. If someone could bake the cupcakes and leave me to decorate them, that would be my ideal! But as that’s not the case, I made some peanut butter and jam cupcakes and used some fabulous Dr Oetker products to decorate them.

The recipe is very easy for the cupcakes, the trick is to mix up the peanut butter with the butter and sugar mix first, not forgetting the vanilla essence! It’s very gooey and will be a fun recipe when Noah gets older. Once the sponge mixture is ready you dollop a little bit in the cases and add a spoon ful of jam, then cover it with another dollop of sponge mix… And bake! They truly are yummy.

Once the cupcake sponges are cooled, it’s my favourite part of baking, decorating and I had some great products to test from Dr Oetker. I have never used pre-made cupcake icing before so I was quite excited about using this, it took me a while to work out that you need to push the nozzle to the side to get the icing out, not push it down etc but once I had Mastered the technique, we were off. It’s so easy to use and it lasted through the whole batch of cupcakes, 12 fully covered cupcakes were ready for more decoration.

I used the shimmer pearls, hundreds and thousands and polka dots to make the cupcakes look a little prettier. They were a gift for my brother and sister for Easter and the reason I went for peanut butter and jam was because my brother is currently in New York, so it was the American theme that inspired me.

I wasn’t sure whether to write on the cupcakes or not, I didn’t think the writing would be very clear because they were already decorated with the other bits, so I used the writing icing to squiggle a pattern over the cupcakes like you see in a box of chocolates. I thought they looked pretty cool, considering it took no time at all to decorate them due to the handy icing sugar, writing icing and decoration tubes: Dr Oetker really have thought about how little time us mummies have on our hands and products like these make cake baking so quick and easy… And still look fab! I can’t wait to start baking with Noah and he can use the cupcake icing, writing icing and get hundreds and thousands everywhere.

You can see some more great products for your baking needs at the Dr Oetker website: http://www.oetker.co.uk

You can like Dr Oetker on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/DrOetkerBaking

If you’re feeling creative check out the great Dr Oetker competition on their Facebook page.