How To Make Fairy Cakes

Hi. We're going to show you how to make vanilla fairy cakes today. This mixture makes enough to make at least 18 fairy cakes, this sort of size.

The fairy cakes are good because they're a bit smaller than a cup cake, they're great for kids so we are going to make just a few to show you but the mixture we're using would make 18. This is the flour or spread going in, I'm adding the butter and the sugar and what we're going to do is we're going to cream them together. Use a wooden spoon so that we're not basically over-beating the mixture.

Just to mix it enough so that the butter and the sugar are basically incorporated and they end up looking basically creamy. Great, then we're going to add our two eggs, they don't need to be beaten before you add them just chuck them straight into the same bowl and mix those really well. You want it to look nice and frothy.

And then once your butter and sugar and egg mixture is as smooth as you can get it, we're going to add a splash of vanilla. It's worth using decent quality vanilla extract about a teaspoonful but just a little splash of vanilla extract. We're then going to add our flour to the mixture.

We've already added about a level teaspoon of baking powder to our flour. It's a good idea to add them at the same time. So you mix it at this point until the mixture is completely combined.

So don't want any floury lumps and that's perfect! For our fairy cakes, as I say, this mixture makes about 18 cakes, we're just going to make a few here to show you how they work. The easiest way to do is to use two teaspoons, fairly full teaspoon here and use the other one to scrap it off. I would say, I'll probably going to need, just depends on the size of your teaspoon, about kind of two teaspoons, these are quite small or you could go larger.

Again the rule is, with your case is, you're filling in about two-thirds full, that's just a general rule to apply to kind of filling cakes into cases. So okay, these are going to be going in there for 10 minutes at 180 degrees Celsius. Again you don't really want them to change color particularly, you just need to be able to touch the top and for the cakes to feel springy and cooked and as if they've risen up.

As you can see our cakes now have risen nicely, it's peaked a bit in the middle but they've not gone really high and they are cooked. So, you want to give them a little press. Yes.

So what we're looking for is that to touch, they are nice and springy and I'm not getting any kind of residue on my finger so they're nice and springy. That shows they are cooked and they're just starting just to with cotton when I suck it too golden brown we're looking for. So we take them of the tray.

They're very soft at this stage but we're going them on a cooling rack so that they can cool completely. So we're going to finish off decorating our fairy cakes. A nice way to do this is to make a just a simple glace icing so I'm just going to add a little bit of water and time to just mix it in with your icing sugar, working quite gently.

What you're looking for is the right consistency so you can make it little or as much icing, glace icing as you need to. And instead of the water you could actually use lemon juice if you want to make lemon glace icing. So it's always a good idea, we've put the water in the jug so we can add a drip of that at a time because you generally don't need as much water as you think you'll need.

So the consistency we're after is kind of spoon-able running icing there. And then with this color paste, you really only need a very tiny bit so we're going to use just what's at the end of a cocktail stick, swirl it through the icing and that should give us a nice yellow color. So it's probably easy at this stage to use a teaspoon to add, to put the glace icing on to your cake.

Let as much run off first and then it's best to gently use the back of the spoon just to kind of pre