Wimbledon cupcakes recipe

Celebrate 125 years of Wimbledon with these impressive cupcakes by goodtoknow's cupcake queen Victoria Threader. Serve with finger sarnies and strawberries and cream in front of the tennis

Ingredients

For the cakes

For the buttercream

• 110g butter at room temperature
• 500g icing sugar, sifted
• 60ml milk
• 1tsp vanilla extra

For the icing

• 500g of ready-to-roll fondant
• 2 teaspoons of gum tragacanth (a natural gum powder, Victoria uses Sugarflair's)
• 200g of flower paste
• Purple food colouring paste (Victoria uses Sugarflair’s Grape/Violet)
• Green food colouring paste (Victoria uses Sugarflair’s Holly Green)
• Gold edible lustre dust
• White alcohol such as gin
• Edible glue

You will need

• Tennis racket mould (Victoria got hers from eBay)
• 6cm, 5cm and 4 1/2cm circle cutters
• Letter embossers (little stamps that you can use to press words into biscuits and icing, Victoria got hers from bakingfrenzy.com)

Method

1. Add 2 teaspoons of gum tragacanth to the fondant and knead well. Wrap in an airtight bag, then place in an airtight container and leave overnight.
2. The next day, bake a batch of basic cupcakes and leave to cool.
3. Make a batch of buttercream by beating together the butter and sifted icing sugar with an electric mixer until smooth. Add the vanilla extract and the milk a tablespoon at a time if you want to loosen the mixture, and beat until smooth.
4. Mould 24 rackets using half of the flower paste. You will only need a little flower paste for each racket as they need to be quite thin. Lay them on a dry sponge to dry. Roll 12 tiny tennis balls and leave them to dry on the sponge
5. Cut the remainder of the flower paste in half and colour one half green. Wrap in an airtight bag.
6. Cut the fondant in half and colour one half purple with the purple paste. Roll the white fondant out quite thinly and cut 12 circles the same size of the cake with the 6cm cutter. Do the same with the purple fondant but jiggle the cutter in a circular motion as you cut, this will make the purple circle slightly smaller so you will have an edge to paint. Stick the purple on the white with a touch of edible glue. Soften the edges with your finger.
7. Roll the white flower paste out really thinly and cut 12 circles for the centre of the cake with the 5cm cutter. Stick them on the purple, then roll the green out really thinly and cut 12 circles with the 4 1/2cm cutter and stick to the white circle.
8. Take the letter embossers and, using the circle as a guide, emboss the words around the edge of the white inner circle.
9. When the rackets and balls are dry paint them gold using a little lustre and a touch of alcohol, then paint the edges of the white circles gold.
10. Then stick the rackets crossed on the green circle adding the ball at the bottom.
11. Bake and ice your cakes then pop this on the top of the buttercream.

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