Did you know today is the world’s biggest coffee morning supporting Macmillan? It’s celebrating its 25th year this year. 25 years! That’s a lot of coffee. I went along to an evening last week with Macmillan at Mark Hix’s Tramshed in Shoreditch to learn a neat trick to decorate cupcakes.

Charlotte White from Restoration Cake taught us a way to decorate cupcakes without all the piles of icing you normally get on the top, by using a fondant icing and making a super cute rose to sit on the top. You start with a blob of buttercream sitting on top of your cake.

Then roll out some fondant, and use a small glass to cut out a circle.

Place gently over the cake and press down lightly with your fingers. You can use the palm of your hand to give a shine and finish it off too.

Now make your roses by rolling up six small balls of fondant and placing them into one of those page protectors you can steal borrow from your work’s stationary cupboard.

Flatten the balls and make a rainbow shape with your finger to make one of the sides really thin.

Roll up one of the petals and then wrap each petal around that, making sure each petal is slightly higher than the other.

It’s so simple to do and it looks gorgeous! I’m totally doing a batch of these for Betsy’s birthday party.

Are any of you taking part in a coffee morning? The church round the corner to us is holding one tomorrow so we’ll be going along to that and I’ll be hosting a little gathering in the next couple of weeks. It’s never too late to host a coffee morning! And if you don’t fancy baking, then Marks & Spencer are selling a selection of cakes with 10% of the sale going to Macmillan.

Before I leave, I just want to leave you with some pictures of where we were last week. Upstairs to Tramshed is the Kitchen Library, and it’s a foodies dream! It holds the most awesome collection of cookbooks and art and has the most gorgeous kitchen in there too. I could quite happily live there. Such an honour to be invited, thank you, Macmillan!