Not a Bookish Bites exactly, and not made with Milo, but for him. It’s Milo’s last day at his nursery today before starting at the kindergarten in his new school next week. I wanted him to have some cupcakes to share with his friends before leaving and took my inspiration from some of the Spring reads we’ve been sharing recently (more about those in a future post).

Milo’s been at his nursery for two years and will miss his friends a lot. And the pink car apparently. And the garden. And his carers. And…. well, you get the picture. He’s feeling excited, sad, nervous and a whole bundle of emotions as are we to be honest. It’s going to be a big (good) change for all of us.

There are a fair few children in Milo’s nursery class so I made a quadruple batch of vanilla cupcake mix using the recipe from The Hummingbird Bakery Cookbook. I like this recipe but I find that the final result can be a bit sticky and it often comes up a touch short when using cupcake cases, hence the quadruple batch to ensure there were enough for kids and staff.

Milo’s extremely excited about Spring and Summer time at the moment and we’ve been reading, talking about the change of seasons a lot recently (although today is much more akin to Winter – sigh!) so he asked that I cover the cakes in flowers. I spent an evening with my feet up in front of the television cutting out little sugarpaste flowers.

Once the cakes were baked I set about making a quadruple quantity of buttercream icing (oh, how his friend’s parents are going to love me for their child’s sugar high tonight!). I divided the icing up and coloured the buttercream in Milo’s favourite colours; lilac, lemon, white and pink and piped onto the cakes.

Onto the decorating. Yay! Favourite bit of course. Vermicelli, sugarpaste flowers and butterflies, a few sugar roses bought from the local supermarket, some little sugarpaste hearts, sunflowers (we’re growing them in the garden just like in