MIDNIGHT BLUE VELVET CUPCAKES
t was about 7pm on a Saturday night. The night before my niece’s 6th birthday.
I’d had a busy week and though I had had it in the back of my mind to ask my sister if she wanted me to bake something I hadn’t got around to it.
So I decided to give my sister a quick call to confirm arrangements for the next day. I thought she might have ordered a cake as she has done that before.
My niece answered the phone and dropped the bombshell:
‘Please can you bring galaxy cupcakes for my birthday?’ she asked.
‘Uh…. I don’t really know what those are!’ I replied.
‘It’s easy – I can help you make them’ she volunteered.
‘I don’t think we have time to make them together cos it’s already quite late now’ I told the eager little baker.
As soon as I got off the phone I sprang into action, using google to find out everything about galaxy cupcakes and what the heck they even are! I discovered that they are usually midnight blue or some sort of dark blue swirl and usually decorated with glitter and silver stars and moons and planets.
Jaye proceeded to go to multiple shops desperately trying to find stars, moons, planets, anything to resemble a galaxy. And then we had to give up – because we couldn’t find anything like that. Not anywhere. Not on short notice anyway.
And then I thought: well what if I just make some midnight blue velvet cupcakes and do a blue sanding sugar for ‘glitter’. And then I’ll see if my sister can find some stars or moons or something near her place and we can just pop them on top of the cupcakes when we arrive!
And so it happened that my niece got her galaxy cupcakes.
So that was what inspired these blue velvet cupcakes. I won’t call them galaxy cupcakes here because other than the color, what makes cupcakes ‘galaxy’ versus not galaxy is the decorations.