vanilla and Strawberry 85th birthday cupcakes

Last month, I was sat round the dinner table with my family and we were talking about birthdays. My Grandma mumbled (loudly) "Well i suppose we won't do anything for my birthday." So, of course, we did.

Last weekend we all gathered around a huge dining table at the Hendon Hall Hotel and had a traditional English tea party.  It was rather poshe. There were scones, smoked salmon sandwiches, the lot.

It was my job to provide cupcakes (would you believe) for the event.  I'm going to do separate blogs about the different ones I made.  Just to keep things neat. 

These ones were quite simple.  A vanilla cupcake filled with some delicious strawberry jam that I bought at a farm shop, with a swirl of buttercream on tome and a sugarpaste strawberry.

It's nice and easy to make sugarpaste strawberries.
You will need:
Red sugarpaste (I like to use pre-coloured red to save time and to get a really deep colour)
Green sugarpaste
cocktail sticks
water
lustre dust (optional)

Make a ball and then a cone out of your red sugarpaste.  Soften the point of the cone until in resembles a strawberry.
Make tiny thin sausages of green sugarpaste and lay them on top of eachother in a star shape, like this *

Then squash them together with your thumb so you have a star shape and then stick it on the top of your red cone with a dab of water.

Next make a little indentation in the middle of your green star and another little sausage for the stem.  Gently press them stem into the hole.

By now you should have something that resembles a strawberry.

Use your cocktail stick, or something similar to make little pricks in the red part, for the seeds.

I like to cover mine with a layer of pearl dust.  Just for prettiness.