Smoky choc cherry cupcakes

Ruth Clemens recently posted a recipe for smoky choc cherry cupcakes that she’d created for last year’s Great British Bake Off. The recipe uses sweet smoked paprika. I love smoked cheese and I’m sure if I weren’t vegetarian I’d love smoked meat too. Something about smoked sweet paprika – both the challenge of finding it in the first place and the promise of an interesting cupcake – was irresistible.

I didn’t realise how hard it would be to find normal-sounding ingredients but Newcastle city centre gave me a tough time. I drew a blank on black cherry jam but managed to find some red cherry conserve in M&S. That’s more or less the same, isn’t it? I bought a tin of black cherries and found out that the syrup is a surprisingly nice drink. I also found out that if your blender makes a terrible noise when blitzing the cherries, it means you’ve NOT bought pitted cherries.

The cupcakes turned out just as Ruth promised: moist and chocolatey with a hint of smokiness. The swirls of dark chocolate ganache mixed with cherry jam set off the cake brilliantly.

To decorate the cupcakes I wanted to try a new way of making sugar butterflies. Many moons ago, a lecturer commented a propos of nothing “If you want students to remember something, tell them in an aside”.

He was right. I’ve no idea what the lecture was about, probably how lush Homer was or summat, but I remember the aside. Recently, I had some classes with Alan Dunn and as an aside he mentioned that a paper cutter can be used with florist paste to create some very delicate cake decorations. I hurried off to Hobbycraft and bought this Martha Stewart butterfly paper cutter.

Using it with sugar is tricky work – the florist paste needs to be very thinly rolled and allowed to dry a little before it is slotted into the cutter. I even dusted the inside of cutter with cornflour.

I painted the butterflies with edible gold dust, rendering them even more delicate and difficult to handle. An easier option is to attach edible gold leaf to the florist paste before cutting. It's a good idea to attach yourself to a millionaire before attempting this, as gold leaf is eye-wateringly expensive.

Lucy is here this weekend to do the Great North Run half marathon. She’ll need the calories so she can have the lion’s share of the cupcakes. Going for gold, bairn!

Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee. Run like a bastard.

Alan Dunn Classes

Gateshead has a lot to be proud of. In recent years landmarks have popped up south of the Tyne that are already nationally famous - the Angel of the North, the Millenium Bridge, the Baltic art gallery and the Sage music centre. Newcastle has long since stopped looking down its nose at Gateshead and now casts an envious eye at its neighbour across the river. It has even started rebranding itself “NewcastleGateshead”. A glossy magazine recently explained "think Buda and Pest, two cities divided by a river". Not sure I'd go that far pet, but Gateshead is daein' canny.

Another name upon which Gateshead can pride itself is Alan Dunn, sugarcrafter extraordinaire. I mentioned a demonstration by him in July and was keen to have some tuition in making flowers. I was tipped off about the best way to contact him (codename Alice), negotiated the release of some cupcakes and arranged two tutorials for this week.

The first flower we did was a peony. Alan showed me how to cut, vein, soften and wire the petals, make the centre, add stamens, and tape everything together. It looked so easy: “oh yes, roll, squish, clag it together” but you forget you're watching 25 years of skilled practice. I flailed about like a contestant on the Generation Game and vowed to take more notes and pay closer attention to the next step: dusting the flower with colour and adding foliage.

My homework was to practise making another peony. “If only school had been this much fun!'” I thought. But by Thursday night, some French irregular verbs would have seemed quite palatable: 2am is not the best time to realise you have no glue and the wrong kind of stamens, but I did my best. Dawn broke, as did several petals, but by breakfast I at least had something to show and didn’t have to claim “the dog ate it”.

Can you spot the difference? Er, yes...

The second lesson was lily of the valley, a pretty stem of buds and flowers. We also made wired butterflies, two of which got the full works with shimmer and glitter, while one was painted like a cabbage white. It made a lovely bouquet with the peony and lily of the valley.

We were kept company by Alan's beautiful assistant Liz, who made up for a lack of opposable thumbs with heaps of enthusiasm and chat.

I ended the week at a group class in Witton Gilbert, County Durham, home of 80s pop sensation Prefab Sprout. Alan had to endure hours of the gentle ribbing that men get from women when they're hopelessly outnumbered (eight to one, he didn’t stand a chance). I suspect he's used to it. We made ylang ylang berries and blossoms, which are very pretty but mean I've had The Chiffons' “do-lang do-lang” chorus stuck in my head all day. We also made yam leaves ready for inclusion in a bouquet of perfume flower and Christmas cactus later this month. Homework is to make more of these. Homework for the homework is to buy some glue this time.

I can wholeheartedly recommend Alan's classes for a very friendly atmosphere of chat, gossip and a million and one tips on sugarcraft – the best place to check out which flowers are coming to a town near you is here. You’ll also be in for some nice 80s musical treats, though I can’t see any Prefab Sprout. Yet…

Alan Dunn

On Monday I went to a demonstration by Alan Dunn. Not a shouty demonstration with police kettling and placards reading "DOWN WITH CUPCAKES!", rather a sugarcraft demonstration in a church hall where the only kind of kettling involved cups of tea.

Alan Dunn is a celebrity in the sugarcraft world. He has written 15 books and travels the world - Brazil, Japan, South Africa, USA - giving classes and demonstrations. Amazingly for someone with so much experience he is young, born the same year as me so yes, YOUNG. Very young. He's managed to acquire over 20 years experience by starting when he was a teenager and gave his first dem aged just 17. He grew up in the north east a few miles from me. I often wish I'd discovered cake decorating much earlier in life, even though I'd have missed out on many happy hours in an office making chains out of paperclips or falling asleep at my desk. 

Alan made a spray with a gardenia, an eyelash orchid and gumnuts ("because I like the funny name") while chatting with the two dozen ladies who watched goggle eyed as he effortlessly brought the flowers to life.

He interspersed his instructions on how to make the flowers with tales of his travels, from the Korean spaghetti with tiny octopuses on it to the koala droppings that smelled amazing (it's the wet eucalyptus). He also showed us a photo of a stunning cake he'd made last week for Bucks Fizz and admitted with admirable honesty that he's a big fan. 

At the end of the dem our names were pulled out of a hat, as is the tradition, and I was the lucky winner of  the flowers he'd just made. It made up for the disappointment of not winning £161 million on Euromillions last Tuesday even though it was my birthday. I guess not buying a ticket didn't help.

My recent birthday celebrations were a good excuse to break the embargo on buying more cake books and I tret mesel to Alan Dunn's new Tropical and Exotic Flowers for Cakes, a beautiful book available in shops this August. I was pleased to find frangipani explained, as an Australian friend had been asking how to make them for a beach wedding. I won't tell you what Alan says his friends in Australia call frangipanis*

*ok, it's scratchy fannies. Rude!