Mostly Cupcakes

If you've been in the shop recently you may have noticed an unusually large amount of pink, paint, not to say a great smell of cake, among our usual bookish and serious activities - and wondered what it was all for.

Well, the sign next to the heater saying 'beware wet paint' wasn't anything to do with a bit of springtime DIY, but was the pièce de résistance of our secret Cupcake Window, which we can now unveil.

The twin celebrations of it being Mother's Day - and a new book from those folk at the Hummingbird Bakery - was too much to resist and we wanted to share our new window which went up today! Many thanks to Ellie and Karen for all their hard work.

Ellie's three-tier cupcake stand is the stunning centrepiece of our cupcake window. (The photo doesn't do it justice - I may have to try another tomorrow.)

Even if you've yet to be won over by the wonder of cupcakes, surely everyone likes a bit of celebratory cake.

The Hummingbird Bakery has been at the forefront of the baking trend and was the first American cupcake bakery in the UK. Their new book 'Cake Days', is a beautiful, highly photographic book packed with easy, fun cakes that are focused on those events and celebrations when people love to bake.

And our Mother's Day special offer will give you £5 off the book.

 If you look closely in the bottom right-hand corner you can see Ellie's homemade cupcakes, complete with tiny hummingbird designs.

Ellie's creativity wasn't just about cupcakes - this is her home made three tier cake (book) stand, which is the feature point in our window. As you can't really tell now it is covered with books just how wonderful it is luckily I took a picture when it was still a work in progress.

Finally - if all of this has made you feel hungry for some, erm, cake - drop in on Saturday - while you are browsing for a perfect Mother's Day gift and card you can sample some of our favourite recipes as we will be serving cupcakes all day (while stocks last). And believe us, we have tried a lot of recipes over the last few weeks to find our favourite and our best!

BBC Oxford Book Club

As of this afternoon, I am the new resident book 'expert' on BBC Radio Oxford's afternoon show, for Jo Thoenes' Book Club. If you'd like to hear how it went, it's on BBC iplayer - fast-forward to about 1 hour 7 minutes. Not sure it'll stay on there longer than a week of course... It was a lot of fun - very laid back, and I was made to feel very welcome by the team there. Bringing along some superb cupcakes for everyone to try (courtesy of Ali - who is a star and insanely talented at these things) definitely helped make a good impression - though I'm sure no-one could follow what I was saying on air thanks to a combination of nerves + my usual arm-waving rapid fire talking in these situations (obviously being on air the arm-waving effect was mostly lost). For the record - my five top recommends for this month are:

• Ali Shaw's remarkable debut novel The Girl With Glass Feet - Gaskella has a wonderful - and spot-on - review over on her blog, but I must just say hats off to publisher Atlantic who have done the book justice in terms of the physical book itself. Ali is up for the Costa First Novel Award in January AND he happens to live and work in Oxford AND we have him coming to the shop in January 18th...
• Neal Stephenson's Anathem. A fine example of all that is good about science fiction by a towering writer who can hold his own against the best in any genre. When a society is in danger of collapse, how best to ensure that knowledge survives?
• Cupcakes From the Primrose Bakery by Martha Swift and Lisa Thomas. We tasted them live on air and they tasted GOOD. These two mumpreneurs started in their own kitchen, and eventually opened their own bakery...
• The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Quantum Genius by Graham Farmelo. Science biographies don't get much better than this, with the long-overdue life story of arguably the finest scientist Britain has produced since Isaac Newton. A man who used his grounding in engineering, and arcane branches of geometry to translate between the old and new physics - and even look ahead to the birth of string theory. Full of literary references, English history and even Cary Grant, this is a tour de force - and has rightly been shortlisted for the Costa Biography Award.
• And finally, the Bedtime Collection: Stories, Rhymes and Pictures for the Very Young compiled by Wendy Cooling. A wonderful bedtime collection of illustrated stories from a veritable whos-who of children's writers and illustrators (it would be easier to list who isn't in the book, which I'm obviously not going to do because that would be mean). With all proceeds going to Bookstart, this is a great way (and at £7.99 great value) to discover a whole load of new authors you may never have come across.

The next show goes out 2pm 27th January. So I'll be on the lookout for my next five books. Oh, and aside from Ali Shaw we'll be letting you know about an event we are doing with Sara Paretsky and a few other 2010 events very soon as well...