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Serve teatime guests with low-faff' cakes which have naughty names and get children to help with the decorations.

A children's tea party could be the perfect excuse for grown-ups to reach for the baking tray and treat themselves to the cream of the cupcake.

With naughty names like Bite My Cherry, chocolate Malteasers and lemony lustres, tucking into a delicious cupcake could be as tempting as a trip to the sweet shop.

Kate Shirazi, founder of Cakeadoodledo mail-order cupcake business, has cooked up some whacky ideas from her farmhouse kitchen in Devon.

Her colourful recipes come in three varieties - low-faff, middling-faff and high faff.

The following recipes are for cakes the whole family can enjoy at teatime and you can get some junior help in the kitchen with the stirring, the decorating - and the tasting of course.

Makes about 12 Shirazi says: "These little dollops are really easy and the glace icing is the simplest to make. Minimum ingredients, minimum fuss and very easily correctable if you make it too thick or too thin,"

Ingredients

110g/1 cup self-raising flour

110g/ cup caster (superfine) sugar

110g/ cup margarine, softened

1tsp baking powder

2 large free-range eggs

1tsp pure vanilla extract

1 quantity of glace icing

Gel food colouring of your choice

Sprinkles of your choice to decorate

For the glace icing - enough for 12 cupcakes

200g/1 cups icing (confectioners') sugar, sifted

Juice of one large lemon or 55ml boiling water

Gel food colouring of your choice

Method

Preheat the oven to 160C/325F/Gas mark 3. Grease and line a 20cm square baking tin.

Sift the flour and sugar into a large mixing bowl, food processor or mixer. Add the margarine, baking powder, eggs and vanilla. Turn on or beat like fury until it's all pale and fluffy. Tip the mixture into the prepared baking tin and level carefully.

Bake in the centre of oven for about 20 minutes or until the cake is firm to the touch and golden. Cool on a wire rack.

To make the icing sift the icing sugar in a bowl. Add the liquid slowly, a little at a time, and stir until smooth. Stop adding liquid when you like the look of the consistency. It should be a smidgen thicker than double whipping cream.

Add a tiny amount of colour - use a cocktail stick or toothpick dipped into the colour. You can always add more if you want, but there is no way to undo a lurid amount of colour without making a super-huge batch of icing.

You now have two options. For both options, you need to have the cake upside down so that the bottom of the cake is the part that's iced. If the top of the cake is not level, just level it by slicing the uneven bit off with a sharp knife so that the cake sits flat.

Option one: Means that you cover the whole cake in icing, add the sprinkles and cut into squares when the icing is dry. Place each square in an individual case.

Option two: Involves cutting the cake into squares first, then drizzling the icing over the individual squares so that the icing dribbles down the sides of the cakes too. Add the sprinkles and, when the icing is dry, place the squares in cases.

10:21am Friday 16th May 2008

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