(Click on the title for more of Majjie's thoughts)

I've looked at a few cupcake books. You probably either hate cupcakes or love them ... but it's difficult to ignore them. A lot of the recipes (and the books) seem to have been put together quite quickly and the quantities don't work too well for small scale baking in the home. The Love Bakery book was the one where the recipes didn't seem to suffer from these problems.

Some of the difficulties may stem from people trying to use their traditional little, fairy cake, paper cases ... the recipes work better with the large muffin style cases. The recipes in the Love Bakery book do seem quite adaptable, though, one reviewer was going to try them out as larger cakes. The book has quite a few different cake mixtures ... not just one basic recipe, with lots of different toppings.

The vanilla cupcakes seemed to be universally admired but there are lots of more exotic types to try, including mango strawberry, banana, earl grey, greek yoghurt, Peruvian bear (with a secret marmalade middle) ... and I like the idea of Love Cuptails - pina colada cuptail anyone?

Samantha Blears is the proprietor of the Love Bakery, on the Kings Road, in London, where the vanilla cupcake is, apparently, still by far the best seller. Her cakes also came first in a blind trial of cupcakes (beating Mama Doreen's Cupcake Company, and the more famous Hummingbird Bakery) ... carried out by the Financial Times (FT.com) ... no honestly, they did!