Beehive Cupcakes

So this week is my final week at work before I start my maternity leave, and so I wanted to bake some cupcakes for my colleagues. 

My friend found this image on Pinterest and sent it to me which was my inspiration.

This is over at Sweetopia, and its meringue icing on a chocolate cupcake. I did want to do the meringue icing, but my little blowtorch is pretty pathetic, and I didn't think it would be able to cope doing this. 

I think you could cope with that amount of meringue icing, but not buttercream, so I adapted the look and taste of this to suite me!

I started by making standard size lemon drizzle cupcakes, and some tiny miniature cupcakes to bulk out the beehive and reduce the buttercream!

I then made some lemon buttercream, gently coloured. It was actually quite tricky to pipe around the mini cupcake, I kept getting gaps between the layers.

I placed a yellow sugarpaste bee on top which I'd striped with dark chocolate drizzles and almond wings.

Here's what it should look like!

And here's a bunch of them, they're not very consistent!

I'd also tried to make some decorations out of the left over dark chocolate. I'm not great at piping lettering so it was quite tricky, but the results are quite cute!

I did sneak one of the more shabby looking cakes to try, and it was delicious, but SO hard to eat, think plates and spoons/forks will be a must!!