Wednesday 27 April 2011

Green's Barbie Vanilla Cupcake Kit review


We love baking here at The Madhouse so the girls were over the moon when they received some baking kits from Green's. We've bought and used them many times in the past but Green's have just relaunched their kids' kits and these were new ones to us. The first one that we tried today was the Barbie Vanilla Cupcake Kit. As you can see from the photo, the girls were very excited !


The first step was unpacking the kit. The box contains everything you need (apart from an egg, some butter and some water) - there's a sachet of cake mix, a sachet of icing mix, some paper cupcake cases, a bag of heart-shaped sprinkles and, as an added bonus, a sheet of Barbie stickers and a double-sided activity sheet, perfect for keeping the kids amused for the 12 minutes the cakes take to bake. (Try saying that fast !) They've thought of everything !


Juliette was a bit tired so Sophie did the mixing part. She's done it so many times, she barely even needs me to supervise now. She even managed to break the egg without getting any shell in the mix. It's great for kids to pick up vital cooking skills in such a reassuringly simple and fun way.


The next job, which is always a bit messy and drippy, was filling the cake cases. Juliette decided she wanted to help at this stage - mainly so that she could lick the bowl out at the end ! Yes, I know it's got raw egg in it but it never did me any harm as a kid so I'm willing to take the risk. Call me a bad mother ! The cake mix is supposed to be enough for 12 cakes but we managed to get 15 (although I did have to add a handful of silver balls to decorate the extra cakes !)



The cakes need to cook for 10-12 minutes so Sophie cleverly decided to set the timer for 11 minutes. Just time for me to do the first bit of washing up while the girls did the activity sheet and *ding* they were ready to take out of the oven.


Time to make the icing. Now usually, in these kits, you get an icing sugar mix that you just add a few spoonfuls of water to. For this cupcake kit, they tell you to add 75g of butter to make butter icing. That's quite a lot of butter !


The butter icing is much less runny than the usual icing but is higher in calories and fat. Each cake contains 139 calories which is quite a lot when you consider that the kids usually want to eat at least two at a time. Sophie wasn't keen on the taste of the butter icing so I added a quick splash of passion fruit flavour SodaStream cordial (which we reviewed here) which gave them a gorgeous fruity taste and orangey colour.


The little heads (Juliette, her friend and Pierre) peering over the top of the kitchen table say it all really ! Time for the taste-testing !


Huge thumbs up from everyone !



Even Pierre !

The kits are probably a bit more expensive than if you put together all the ingredients yourself or, as we sometimes do, if you buy a supermarket economy bag of sponge cake mix but they do have the extra special bits like heart-shaped sprinkles, Barbie pictures and stickers and kid-friendly instructions. I love the fact that it gives the kids confidence and basic cooking skills in a relatively mess-free and foolproof way. I'll definitely be buying them again.

star rating : 4.5/5

RRP : £1.69

available from Tesco

for more information : http://www.greenscakes.co.uk/

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6 comments:

  1. looks so yummy i will have to try these xxx

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  2. the cupcakes looks very tasty

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  3. my daughter would love to make these!

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  4. Keep at least one of these boxes in cudboard, for the just in case we need something different to do with Grace. Nice review

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  5. thanks thaat was so helpful i thought you just poured it in with some water lol im soo blond xx thanks again

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  6. im only 12 i loved making them with my nephuew willaim

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