The lonely cupcake weekend

This weekend after the children had gone to stay with their father and the boyfriend had gone back to his own flat for some quality 'alone' time, I found I was all by myself  with no one to cook for.
Not wanting to cook something that would probably have gone off by the time they all returned I thought that as I enjoy making cupcakes and they can be stored easily and used for packed lunches, friends popping round for teas etc. etc. I would do this,... but use recipes I had never previously made and decorate them in ways I hadn't in the past.
So after a trip into town to stock up on icing sugar (and a slight detour via New look, the Dior counter at Debenhams, lunch in a cafe and a general window shop) I embarked on a mass cupcake make.

With music blaring (a nice collaboration of 90's hits which remind me of my late teens/early 20's) I made 6 batches of cupcakes, half vanilla sponge and half what the recipe called chocolate whoopie muffins.
I then set about decorating them in various ways.
First and my ultimate favourite were the Lemon Sherbet cupcakes.
Made with your basic vanilla sponge recipe and the icing was 500g icing sugar, 110g butter, 2 tsp lemon essence, several tbsp of double cream until you get the consistency and 3 packets of lemon sherbet dib-dabs (an extra one for decoration after is good too)

Next I tried the chocoholic whoopie muffins and the Oreo whoopie muffins which I thought are a little dense, but this could be because on reflection I didn't quite stick to the recipe I forgot to add a few of the ingredients
 35g cocoa powder,
300g plain flour
1tsp baking powder
1tsp bicarb of soda
1 pinch of salt
100g unsalted butter
175g dark brown soft sugar
1 egg
1 tsp vanilla extract
125 ml milk
25g white choc chips
25g dark choc chips

Sieve together the cocoa, flour, bicarb, baking powder and salt,
cream the butter and sugar,
beat in the egg to the butter mix,
stir together the milk and vanilla,
add the cocoa mix to the butter mix alternating with the milk mixture until smooth
fold in the chocolate chips,
add to cases and bake for approx 20 mins.

All were decorated with a basic chocolate butter icing 500g icing sugar, 110g butter, 100g cocoa powder 2 tsp of vanilla essence and several tbsp of double cream until you get the consistency you want.

Finally I used vanilla flavoured butter icing with pink food colouring in to ice the remaining vanilla sponge cakes, and white vanilla butter cream and a packet of mini party ring biscuits to make the party ring cakes.
Feeling creative and having time on my hands I then decorated a few with some ribbon (I saw this idea in a cook book and thought they looked pretty.)

So I had filled my weekend and didn't get lonely at all but having made all these cakes i had no one to test them on...... but then on Sunday evening everyone came back home.
Did they like my cakes? Judging the number of empty cases left on the table yes they did, only the boyfriend offered constructive criticism saying that as I had thought the whoopie muffins were a bit dense and a tad dry and you know what? I can live with that.