I'm going to show you a few techniques on how to make perfectly decorated fairy cakes
we all know cupcakes but we're going to bring back the good old British fairy cake
so what I'm going to show you is four different techniques
using butter cream icing
and some rolled out
fondant icing
if you're going to fill a piping bag 
all you need to do is put the piping bag
with the nozzle into a jug
and then you can
open up the piping bag and you can fill it quite easily because your hands 
will be free
so with your hand
at the bottom
using it to direct the piping back
and a hand at the top
is doing the pressure
to squeeze the icing out of the bag
so you want to make sure the icing
goes right up to the edge of the case
and make sure, as much as possible
that the icing bag
is vertical
so with even pressure
slowly
just move the icing bag
around the edge
you've got plenty of time so don't rush it
and then
go over the top half
and when you finished, ease off on the
pressure
and just pull the bag up
and you should get a lovely little peak like that
so you end up with a perfect little fairy cake
so that's the first technique
the second one
I'm going to use a chocolate icing, this is the same butter cream icing all I've done is added in 
some cocoa powder
so taking another fairy cake
what I'm going to do is a rosette 
pattern
so again keeping the piping bag
quite upright
and again using this
lower hand
to direct the bag and again the upper
hand
to squeeze
so what you want to do
is
push down
and then ease off the pressure and pull
away
and just keep
doing that 
around the fairy cake
move it slightly with your hand rather than moving the piping bag
and then pull away
as you do it and become more practiced it becomes easier and easier
and again just keep rotating round
you can do a double layer if you wanted to
but I am just gong to do a single layer
and what we're going to do it finish off the middle bit
is just do a big rosette in the middle so squeeze a bit harder
and then pull away
and you end up with a really cute little different idea to the swirl
then for the third technique using butter cream icing 
take another fairy cake
I've just got some pink icing that I've made using red colouring
just add as much as you want to your desired colour
then get the little palette knife
and you want to use
the case to help you
spread on the actual icing itself
so you just move that around, I might put a little bit more on there, good to be a little bit
generous
and again move the case around
not your palette knife
so you do that
this is when you rotate the case in your hand
and then use the palette knife
just to smooth it off
a little bit like so
and to cover it all
and then at the end you can just go back over it
until you are happy
so there you go, we've got three different ideas
using butter cream icing
the fourth technique is to use ready-made
icing
that you just roll out between two pieces of cling wrap
like I've done here
put the icing on top and then put another piece of cling wrap on top of that
and then what you do is you roll it out to your desired thickness 
and then it saves any mess on the work surface
so I've chosen to use black and yellow, bit of a
bumblebee theme
and what you want to do is take the fairy cake you want to decorate
I'm going to use some cutters, I've got some round ones 
and some star ones
you just want to make sure you get a
cutter
the right size to fit just inside the
case itself
so i think I'm going to do a black disc first of all
this is great, you can get kids to help you
get them to roll it out, they can use the cutters et cetera
and you can help them to put it on top
now you don't need to have anything to
stick it on there
so position it on like that
and then this is where you can have lots of
fun
you can use maybe
the star cutter with the yellow
and again
we can just position that on the top
like so
and you can see how simple it is to make
a really striking design straight away
I'm just going to finish mine off
with a little round
black circle
so there's a whole host of ideas you can do
the ones I've done with butter cream icing
you can use any toppings
we've got little chocolate sprinkles here,
some coloured balls, mini marshmallows
I think I'm going to put a few chocolate sprinkles on there
just to jazz that up a bit
and maybe some pink and white little
marshmallows
on top of there
might just put them in the center
but again have as much fun as you like, kids love dipping into this
and sprinkling them over
you see, mess everywhere, that's what we love
and there you've got some pretty little ideas
you've even got some sweets here that you can buy
and you can pop those on as well
so over here we've just got a little selection of what we've done, and there you go, as easy as that!