Soft Toy Wedding; We Baked Cupcakes!

 We went to a soft toy wedding today (yes,really!) so we contributed some cupcakes. We made some coffee chocolate cupcakes first that were so strong when we first tried them that we thought we'd forgotten the sugar! I thought that they'd be ok if they had some frosting on- I don't like cake being too sweet anyway. So, I made some butter cream icing using Pure Margarine and icing sugar, a touch of soya milk and then flavoured with Sweet Bird English Toffee Syrup. It came out pretty sweet, but I thought it made a nice contrast to the less sweet cupcakes and together they tasted really lovely; I would definitely make them again. I thought a bit of colour would be nice, so I took some of the butter cream and whizzed up a huge blackberry in it; the colour was amazing and it added a nice berry flavour which I thought went very well with the cupcakes too.

  At the point at which we'd just tried the coffee cupcakes for the first time and they seemed a bit 'sophisticated' and not very sweet, we decided to make some others as well, as a Plan B, so we made some peanut butter cupcakes with a bit of ganache and roasted chopped hazelnut on top. By the time they were out of the oven, we'd iced the first ones and they were fine, so we ended up taking them both- and being rather late!
  Yesterday evening, I saw one of our VegaNation rescued cats with a little creature in her mouth; we all piled outside again; she dropped the vole in the grass as soon as the Vegans appeared, and we were able to divert her while one of the children caught the vole in the grass and we quickly took it to a safe release site and let it go.
  This evening we had taken the children upstairs and then I just came downstairs again to fetch something. I was just coming back up when I heard a rustling in the back hall, and when I went to investigate I found one of our cats, the same one, pawing about among the wellies and other detritus on the hall floor. I quickly spotted a vole scooting about and, after calling for re-enforcements who arrived on the scene admirably quickly and very sensibly put a new lightbulb in the hall light and then scooped up the vole and released it in a safe place outside.