Bake personalised fairy cakes
Bake your own fairy cakes
Introduce your child to the joys of baking with this quick and simple recipe. Fairy cakes use everyday ingredients and can be decorated to suit many different occasions.
Braille decorations, made out of smarties, chocolate chips or silver balls, will create something different. Not only do they taste great, they’ll make your cakes stand out.
If cooking’s not your thing, you can also pick up pre-made cakes and add the braille at home.
What you will need:
- 110g/4oz butter or margarine, softened at room temperature
- 110g/4oz caster sugar
- 2 eggs, lightly beaten
- 1 tsp vanilla extract
- 110g/4oz self-raising flour
- 1–2 tbsp milk
- Icing pens and edible cake decorations
How to make festive fairy cakes
- Preheat the oven to 180C/160C Fan/Gas 4 and drop paper cases into 2 x 12-hole fairy cake tins. (Look for Christmas-themed paper cases or choose ones in festive colours like red or green).
- Cream the butter and sugar together in a bowl until pale. Beat in the eggs, a little at a time, and stir in the vanilla extract.
- Fold in the flour using a large metal spoon. Add a little milk until the mixture is a soft dropping consistency and spoon the mixture into the paper cases until they are half full.
- Bake in the oven for 8–10 minutes, or until golden-brown on top. Set aside on a wire rack to cool completely.
- Once cool, your cakes can be decorated to make them look festive. Use icing pens to draw stars, trees, elf hats or any other Christmas shape. Or you can simply add dots of icing and attach Christmas-themed edible cake decorations.
Learning to bake at home is an engaging and educational sensory activity for children with vision impairment. Children will feel the festive joy as they experience the tactile sensation and the sweet smell of their freshly baked fairy cakes.
Braille is a tactile writing system used by people with sight loss. It is traditionally written with embossed paper and made by raised dots. The dots are in different places for each letter. Just as people become very fast at reading, children with vision impairment can become very fast at reading braille with their fingertips. See your name in braille using BrailleBug's game.