The storm before the calm

The preparations for the market always seem to fly by in a flurry of icing sugar powder air and a whirring swishing blur of the whizzing food processor and the hot water of washing up between each batch.

For the market this week I have two new additions- the first is a Halloween special; mini vanilla and chocolate cupcakes for the trick or treater’s iced in orange butter icing (and perhaps decorated with tiny fondant icing spiders and bats if I can work out how to make 50 of them in-between coming home from work, putting Darling boy to bed and bed time myself) For the grownups, but probably also for the kids too, sticky toffee pudding cupcakes, iced with a toffee butter icing, and with a sticky toffee goo in the middle. The cupcakes are baked and safely stashed in their tuppaware and after work tonight I am going to be injecting them with the warm toffee goo. It has to be warm, as it's pretty much solid when cool. I haven’t quite worked out how I’m going to do it as the gadget I need is a squeezy bottle with a long, straight thin nozzle- and I haven’t got one of those. So I will have to improvise (not a word you want to hear when it comes to hot sugary sticky substances) I think it will involve a chopstick to make the hole, and an adapted icing bag, and quite a bit of swearing- all in the name of what I’m sure is going to be a gooey gorgeousness of a cupcake.