Valentines Cupcakes using Bakers Toolkit ♥

As I’m sure most of you are aware, I love baking! I’m still not very brave and adventurous and tend to stick to simple vanilla cupcakes, but I love trying out new techniques and using new things to decorate them with. I’m sure those of you that watched BBC’s The Apprentice last year will remember the feisty bubbly Luisa Zissman, a retail entrepreneur who was a runner up in the series. I absolutely loved watching her every week, and she was my favourite candidate to win, but I think she’s done better on her own anyway.

Her business plan was to use Lord Sugar’s £250,000 to create a wholesale firm catering to the baking market. She has now created her own brand, Bakers Toolkit, which sells a range of professional cake decorating and baking products at high street prices. Luisa is also founder of Dixie’s Cupcakery; a cake shop in St Albans, and The Baker Shop, an online retail of baking and cake decorating products.

I was really excited to get to try out a range of the Bakers Toolkit products, and I was sent a lovely goody bag full of fab items to try out. At the weekend I got my apron on and gave everything a try to make a few quick Valentines Day cupcakes. I’m actually giving these to my best friend tonight when I meet her for dinner.. I hope she likes them! I got to try out all of the products, and I can honestly say I’m really impressed with them.

I absolutely love these beautiful sprinkles, how adorable is the cupcake topped packaging?! The shimmer pearls (RRP £3.95) perfectly set off delicate cupcakes, and the heart shaped white and pink sprinkles (RRP £3.49) are perfect for romantic treats or little girls princess themed cakes. 

I used these bold bright red paper cases (RRP £2.25) for the Valentines Day cupcakes, and they were great to use; no issues with peeling, losing colour, or going transparent. They’re also the large muffin sized ones, which I find difficult to source, as all I can ever find in nice colours are the little fairy cake ones! 

To make the cupcake topper decorations I use ready to roll icing. This comes pre-coloured (or white, ready to colour) and you simply roll the icing out (I use cornflour so the icing doesn’t stick to the surface) and then I use cutters or moulds to create pretty shapes. This icing is really soft and easy to warm up between your hands to create an easy to use substance. Sometimes I find heavily coloured icings have a bit of a bitter taste to them from using all the dye, but these ones don’t have that nasty taste. They come in a range of colours and are only £1.75 each. 

I’d not really used edible glitter properly before, so I was pleased to be able to try these out. I received four different colours, and these can be used to add extra sparkle to your cakes and cupcakes. The glitter can be applied using a paint brush, and you can just lightly sprinkle it over the cake. It sticks especially nicely to buttercream to make it shimmer! 

I was really thrilled to get to try out this set of food colouring pastes (RRP £1.99 each). These are used to colour the ready to roll icing, and to use, I get a cocktail stick and apply a small amount to the icing, and then kneed it in with my hands. Red is notoriously difficult to make using icing, as it generally just goes pink so I always buy red icing ready made. I applied a small amount to a ball of icing to make pink for the decorations.