Food allergies and birthday parties - easy allergy-friendly cupcakes

Artistic talent not really necessary

Does your heart sink when your child with food allergies bounds out of school waving a party invitation? Me too.

Not because I'm a tight-fisted killjoy and I don't want to fork out for yet another present (although that too) but because parties are a bit of a trauma when food allergies are involved.

I have spent miserable hours positioned behind my daughter watching her say no to chocolate fingers and elaborately iced cupcakes. I'm a dab hand at frisking party bags for allergens and I can catch a falling milkshake from twenty paces (slight exaggeration). So all in all, parties with food allergies are pretty crap.

But, whining won't get us anywhere will it?

So I'm about to show you how to rustle up some allergy-friendly cupcakes for when your child is next invited to a party. 

And the aim here is to make the cupcakes look so damned amazing that all the kids with easy lives and no allergies say "Wow! Can I have one?" (Answer: "No, piss off and eat a chocolate finger.")

You will need:

1 allergy friendly chocolate cake recipe: 

This recipe never gets old

1 tub of Betty Crocker filthily naughty, how-many-additives-can-there-be, delicious icing:

It's OK to eat this straight from the tub. (With your fingers.)

And an array of pretty, allergy-friendly cake decorations (and maybe a bag of marshmallows):

It's OK to eat all six

Here's what you do:

1. Realise a bit late that there's a party in a few hours and you have to provide 'safe' food for your child
2. Quickly print off my chocolate cake recipe, or my chocolate and zucchini recipe
3. Follow the instructions, but put the mixture into cake cases, not one big tin. Bake
4. Leave to cool, during which time you can run around the house looking for scissors, sellotape, a clean party outfit and the birthday card that you have put in a 'safe place'
5. Apply Betty Crocker icing to the cupcakes liberally and with gay abandon
6. Then go wild: for the spiky cake, use the back of a knife to pat the icing so that it forms little peaks, for sprinkley cakes, apply - err - sprinkles and for my favourite marshmallow cakes, cut the marshmallows up and stick on the cake until it looks impossibly sickly and decadent
7. Feel pleased that your child has kick ass cake
8. Go to the party
9. Come back from party
10. Pour a stiff drink 

There, not so difficult was it? :-) 

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