I picked up this recipe book, The Hummingbird Bakery Cookbook, with some book tokens I had for my birthday as it seemed to be full of the kind of cake recipes I want. I have endless cookbooks full of recipes for ordinary cakes but these seemed to be the kind of more exciting flavoured cakes that catch your eye in a bakery that I’d love to be able to make at home.

First recipe I tried out was the Strawberry Cheesecake Cupcakes.

They were as delicious as expected but there were enough things slightly wonky with the baking process that I thought I’d write them down for another time. These may be my fault or the book’s, I’m not yet sure.

• I was using UK muffin cases for a cupcake recipe as the book directs and yet the mix only just about made 8 cakes and not 12 as it said. (Though I’m quite happy with an 8 cake recipe I wonder if I put too much mix in each case.)

• The recipe has you put chopped up strawberries right at the bottom of the case and the cake mix on top. This made the cakes difficult to get out of the cases to eat and I think they may have been better with some cake mix under the berries and will try that next time.

• The cream cheese frosting mix would indeed have been just the right amount for 12 cakes… but I only had eight.

• The recipe suggests smashing up 200g of digestives for the topping. That would have been way way way too much. Two or three biscuits would have been plenty.

Hummingbird have a list of baking tips on their website which I’ve had a look at and am pretty certain I followed the instructions correctly. In any case the results weren’t perfect but they were delicious and I’ll be doing plenty more baking from this book soon.