I heart cupcake cookies

Cupcake and heart sugar cookies

Not real cupcakes, but I had a great deal of fun decorating these, although the results are admittedly clumsy. I have two left hands, at best, but these were still fun to do, therapeutic with music and the aircon on. Have to perfect a sugar cookie recipe though. Tried these with the original amount of sugar, part icing, part granulated, and the dough was still hard to handle. It doesn't roll or cut well, and the cookies spread a great deal during baking. In fact, the cupcake shapes were unrecognisable, and to salvage them, I cut them after they were baked – hence the rough edges.

The hearts came out better, maybe because heart-shapes have more definition in the first place. I tried some designs from Cookie Craft on them.

Fun. I like that these are more project-like, with the various stages of icing, and more arty, with the colours and designs. I also love how easy clean-up is, the icing washes away with none of the horrid cling of buttercream since it's mainly sugar. And of course I love the excuse to buy more equipment! :)

Fantasy cupcakes v7.0

One-bowl chocolate cupcakes with rainbow buttercream

Cuspcake rating: 3.5

These looked much better in my head than they did in real life. Tried the one-bowl choc cupcakes recipe from Martha Stewart as I've read favourable reviews of them several times, and am still in search of a go-to chocolate cupcake recipe.

This one was easy, chocolatey and moist (it uses oil instead of butter) and was light and tasty – definitely a go-to in-a-hurry recipe. The batter was liquid too, which made filling the cups especially easy.

The rainbow buttercream was too soft, as my buttercream is wont to be, partly I think the new brand of butter I bought. The painting-the-inside-of-the-piping-bag method was fun though (although my hands were stained with food colouring for several days after!). Used animal biscuits to cover up the ugly piped cream (and uneven colours) but it was too soggy so they wouldn't stay up straight. Also wasn't able to get the chocolate teddy grahams I'd wanted, which I think would've been alot cuter than these plain zoo ones.

These were nice, and will use them in future for sure, especially in a pinch. They're crowdpleasers, but lack a certain something-something, will continue to look for the perfect choc cuppies...