Like many people who enjoy cooking, I never saw the point of shop-bought cake mixes. Then my child came along, and suddenly I understood. We have had lots of fun making things from scratch – banana cake was easy and tasty, Anna Del Conte's pineapple cake, less straightforward, but delicious, and pancakes are of course a doddle. But it can take a little planning to ensure the right ingredients are to hand, my three-year-old is sometimes desperate to bake on those days you can't get to the shops, and I'm keen to encourage his burgeoning interest in making food. So I keep an emergency cake mix in the cupboard – it's a quick fix, playing to a toddler's attention span, and involves little washing up, playing to mine.
Well, at least a quick fix is how it should be. But when I tested a range of mixes I found that isn't always the case. Tesco's Chocolate Cupcake Mix, for example, demanded an egg, milk, oil and butter. What did they supply? Mostly flour, chocolate curls, and paper cases. Several called for large volumes of butter and eggs and/or milk. Some were great, such as Dough it Yourself's Fudgy Coconut Brownie Mix - a thing of beauty with delicious chocolate chips, cocoa and coconut which you simply mixed with eggs and melted butter to produce brownies to die for. But it lacked the fun factor - my toddler was unimpressed once the mixing was done. He got far more excited about sugary pirates from another kit.
Comes in a box that works for both children – my toddler wanted to make them as soon as he saw it – and parents. It says on the front exactly what you need to supply (just an egg and water) and how many you'll make. The instructions were clear, the chocolate cake mix fairly smooth, and the cakes rose well. The water icing was easy enough for a three-year-old to make, and the pirate decorations topped them off nicely. Tasty, too. I'd buy this again.
★★★★★
The packet has instant child appeal and comes with a whole bag of sweets, so there are some spare after you've decorated the six cakes the mixture runs to (that seems a little stingy, and they are smaller than you'd imagine). The icing is moreish, but not as good as homemade buttercream despite the great big chunk of butter you need to supply. The cake is nice – the mix looked lumpy but rose well and was light and fairly tasty – but it's a bit of a struggle to eat with a whole Percy Pig on top. I?might buy this for a Percy Pig fan, but it doesn't really make enough for the effort.
★★★
If your child loves Playdoh, they'll love this – it comes as a lump in a plastic tub with a mini gingerbread man cutter. I?wasn't impressed as we rolled out the mixture – it seemed simultaneously greasy and dry, but it was the hottest day of the year. Cutting out the shapes and adding the supplied raisins as buttons provides quite a bit of entertainment, and there's a tube of icing for decoration when they're cooked. They looked pretty dodgy, and a few lost limbs, but the flavour was decent.
★★★
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