Mini carrot cakes with lemon drizzle icing

This was an an attempt to cheer you up, and distract you from the spots. It seemed to work - you had a ball drizzling the icing everywhere.

Makes about 12 little fairy cakes/cupcakes.

You'll need:

4oz butter
4oz sugar
4oz self-raising flour
2 eggs
1 teaspoon of mixed spice
3oz grated carrot
1 tablespoon raisins

Stick the oven on at 175 degrees C, and line your tins with baking cases (your favourite bit).

Put the butter, sugar, flour, mixed spice and eggs in a food processor, and blitz until everything's well combined and smooth. You could do this by hand - it'll just take longer and need more elbow grease.

Take your blade out of the food processor. Add the grated carrot and raisins, and mix by hand (you don't want to do this bit with the processor, as you'll end up with shredded raisins) to create a fairly sloppy batter.

Spoon the batter into your cases, trying not to drip. Bake in the oven for 20 minutes or so, until the cakes have risen, and turned golden brown. Take out of the tins, and place on a rack to cool.

For the lemon drizzle icing you'll need:

1oz icing sugar
a little lemon juice

Sift the icing sugar into a bowl. Add a couple of splashes of lemon juice, and mix to a smooth paste. Thin this with a little more lemon juice, until it drips nicely off your spoon, and can be drizzled dramatically over the cakes, plate and worktop.

Glace icing

More birthday preparations - I used this recipe to ice your strawberry cake (recipe for that to follow too).

You'll need:

8oz icing sugar
40ml hot water

Sift the icing sugar into a large bowl. This part is really good fun, even if most of the sugar does have a tendency to go over the worktop. Gradually add the water (you may not need all of it, especially if you're intending to add some liquid food colouring) and beat the mixture with a wooden spoon.

Depending on what texture of icing you want, you'll need to add more or less water. If you just want a thin glaze to drizzle over the top you'll maybe need more than the 40ml. I had fairly thick (but still drippable) icing to cover your cake - in pink for the strawberry part, and then green for the stalk.