Sunday 23 October 2016

Baking with Betty (Crocker)

Once again I have been chosen to take part in an Insiders EU campaign (to find out how to join the Insiders and take part in fabulous projects like this on please click here and read my guide)

So the idea behind this campaign is to get people like myself who are not the best at baking to get involved in it and to encourage them to introduce it to the kids as well :)

I applied as it seemed a great opportunity to introduce D (aged 6) and H (aged 3) to the joys of baking.

Happily I was chosen to take part YAY and a couple of days after the e-mail telling me I had been chosen (long with 2500 other insiders!) my goody box arrived.



One of the great things about the Insider's campaigns is they literally send you everything you need to take part - not just the products (which are awesome!) but:


A booklet with ideas and all the campaign info as well as business cards about the Insiders which you can hand out to friends, colleagues and family who might be interested in joining.


As this campaign was all about Baking - we also got 5 fantastic recipe cards to give us ideas of what to make with out free products - we might be baking out of a box but these recipe cards lets you create ideas out of the box too!


A fun little activity plan for the half term week of ideas of what else you can do with the kids :)


A ridiculously generous amount of money off voucher 20 x £1 to be exact - with the offers on in various stores (ASDA e.g.  have buy 2 Betty Crocker products for £3) your friends and family and yourself will be able to use these vouchers to buy the products at less than half price - who doesnt love a bargain!


FREE PRODUCTS!!! The best bit lol - for this campaign we have been provided with a box of velvety vanilla cake mix - you can use this to make a cake like on the pic on the box or for cupcakes; A box of brownie fudge mix; a packet of choc chip cookie mix and a tub of vanilla frosting/icing. The recipe cards use these products to make various goodies so there's plenty there to use.

Now my original plan was to make something out of these products in the week BUT it's my turn to take cakes into work on Monday following Selasi leaving Great British Bake Off - so I persuaded H & D that we needed to do some cupcakes this weekend.

We decided to try making our own design and I needed to make enough cupcakes for the whole of work plus some for H&D too (and me of course!) so I used the vouchers and got 4 packs of vanilla cake mix in ASDA for £2 and we got baking!

We decided to throw caution to the wind and to make some multi-coloured cakes. It was surprisingly easy and super effective!

We mixed together the wet ingredients (water, sunflower oil and 3 eggs) and then mixed in food colouring - I only had red, blue and purple so we did those colours we then mixed the wet in with the boxed mix and voila coloured batter appeared :

Rainbow batter mix!

We made up a batch each in blue, purple and red and then another batch au nautral and then it was just a case of lining the cupcake tray with cases and spooning the mix in and baking

Blue cupcakes cooling

Red cupcakes cooling and purple cupcake mix ready to go in the oven
Once the cupcakes were all baked (each batch took 20 mins to bake and about 5mins to make up the batter) we let them cool and then decorated them with the delicious vanilla icing - I dont have any posh baking equipment so we literally used a tea spoon to scoop a dollop of icing out and stuck it on the cake and then decorate each one with stuff from the cupboards!

We have sprinkles on purple, smiley faces and flowers on plain cupcakes

We have witches and chocolate patterns on blue cupcakes

We have flowers and butterflies on red cupcakes and marshmallows on purple
H & D loved decorating the cakes - the only rule they had was that they had to make 5 of each pattern which they stuck too until the last batch of blue ones and then they just used up the last bits of chocolate however they could!

After making the cupcakes there was lots of little bits  of different coloured mix left over. Rather than throw it away I decided it to try making a marble effect loaf cake. I poured the red in first, then topped it with some plain, then added the purple and topped with the last of the plain and finished off with the blue. It came out amazingly well!


 After all that baking we all took a well deserved bake and tried the cakes out - they are delicious!

Overall we spent around 2 1/2 hours making up the cake mixes, baking the cakes in the oven and then decorating the cakes. D & H each had 4 cupcakes (not in one go!) and I am taking 40  into work with me. We also have the delicious marble cake which is sliced up and wrapped in clingfilm and stored in a nice air tight container.

We did use all the cake mix provided plus another 3 packets (still have one spare) and the whole tub of icing as well as some smarties, some buttons, some chocolate orange and some sprinkles and a whole box of eggs!

The mix was very easy to do - we dont have a mixer so we mixed everything by hand and everything blended well and baked and came out exactly as it was supposed to - it was really super easy to do.

We are going to try making brookies (brownies v cookies) using the last 2 mixes next weekend as I think we have enough cake to last us for a bit now :)




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