My apologies if this has been asked a million times. For some reason whenever I try to use the search function it takes about 10 minutes to load anything.
I must say now, I am not familiar with any of the abbreviations on this site so please bear with me.

I have been asked to make a vanilla cake with blue frosting inside and 20 vanilla cupcakes for a baby shower next weekend. It will be my first cake that is going to someone outside of my family and the first one that I will be getting paid for (its for a friends sister so I am only asking for the cost of the ingredients & electricity), so I am incredibly nervous.

I have been troweling through recipe pages looking for a good vanilla cake recipe that is moist but can still hold under the weight of fondant and perhaps and smaller second tier. Any suggestions?

While I'm posting, I also wanted to ask about buttercream frosting for cupcakes. Is there a good recipe for one that pipes well? Whenever I seem to do it, my frosting looks like its melting but if I add more sugar, it becomes too sweet.

I would usually like to do a practise run with different recipes but money is tight at the moment as its my son's birthday soon so I can't afford to.

Any help/advice would be very much appreciated

A scratch cake that I really love:
http://www.cheekykitchen.com/2009/12/brown-sugar-vanilla-cupcakes.html

It's sturdy and incredibly tasty.

For a box mix, I lovelovelove (and have in the oven at the moment) Betty Crocker French Vanilla cake mix doctored with 1 extra egg, 1 box of french vanilla instant pudding, and 2 tsp of vanilla.

Happy caking.

I just made Kakeladi's Original WASC recipe and used the French Vanilla cake mix and used vanilla bean paste with it (but you can use extract for sure). I had tons of compliments on it. It will be fine with fondant. I haven't tried it in a cupcake, but I can't see why it wouldn't be fine as well.

http://cakecentral.com/recipes/7445/the-original-wasc-cake-recipe

Thank you for the suggestions! I'll look into those.

Only problem with the cake mixes is that I am in the UK and we don't have much of a selection as far as they're concerned. I think we have a few Betty Crocker chocolate cake mixes but thats it lol.

I'll have to keep an eye out!

I live in Ireland and have the same issues buying Betty Crocker cake mixes in shops . You can but them on EBAY though. Good luck !

ive discovered a sneaky way of getting recipes out of books without even buying them lol

If you look on amazon you can look through books by lindy smith and debbie brown (they do that 'look inside' on some books) and the recipes are there for you to follow

I have got the Lindy smith cakes to inspire book anyway but you can see the recipes on there.

With the frosting I have found that by making it with Trex instead of butter means its more firm plus you dont need to use as much as you would real butter and no-one has ever noticed the difference with mine.(and its alot cheaper)

Also the buttercream will be slightly yellow using butter which might make your blue slightly greeny coloured whereas with the trex being white it will colour better.

just checked out amazon ! great tip , thanks

Thank you all so much for the tips. Excellent idea with amazon lol. I'll have to give that a go if I can find a good book!

If I make the buttercream with Trex, do I use the same amount as I would with butter or do the quantities change? I'm so glad you said about it turning a slightly green colour. I'm making the cupcakes on the day so that would've been a disaster lol!

LaLaLucy

When I've made frosting I usually make cream cheese frosting so use 1 part Trex 1 part cream cheese and the 2 parts icing sugar plus a teaspoon of vanilla essence and it works well