Betty.

Dear readers, I have committed the most shameful act a baker can do. I used a boxed cake mix. But I had to, both for my own intrigue and to save you the pain of ever having to do so.

I chose of course Betty Crocker's infamous range of cake mixes for which you need only add 1 egg!

I felt ashamed as I peeled open the box and took out the mixture of god knows what accompanied by the squashed cupcake cases. If ever you needed a reason to bake from scratch, Betty Crocker has put it in a box.

Here's all you'll need...

Who needs to cream butter and sugar when you can add water to some brown powder?

The Egg.

Egg, mix, and water.

Having mixed my 3 'ingredients', there is no sense of achievement in mixing together an egg, water and some powder. None of the sense of time, effort and love that goes into making a cake from scratch. There's no weighing of ingredients, sifting, beating or creaming. It's a completely souless experience.

I'm all for saving time, but really once you have your flour, sugar, eggs and butter, baking at its most basic is mixing them all in one bowl. In fact in the time it took me to get Betty's Box open, cut open the plastic bag and tip it in to a bowl, I could have me a delicious home made cake mix...

The mix at this stage is quite grainy and bland, with, and I stress, a hint of chocolatey taste. So no fear of eating all your mix before it hits the oven...

And of course Betty was kind enough to squash some cupcake cases into the bottom of her box...

To be fair to Mrs. Crocker...it does make 6...

Ahem...Tudaah...

So texture wise, not too shabby. Moist...muffiny...tasteless. They really were like chewing on a muffin with literally no taste. Again, there was a whiff of chocolate in the air, but it really was just largely chewing on something that really wanted to be a muffin, but grew up to be a sad little chewy thing.

If you want to bake some muffins, or a cake, because you want to show people what they look like, or you want to poison your worst enemy, I'm Betty all the way.

But if you want to really bake a muffin, or a cupcake, or a cake, then I urge you to bake from scratch! The pennies you'll save buying Crocker's Box of Wannabe-Cake really isn't enough to justify not spending a few more pennies and another 10 minutes baking real cakeage the real way.

Down with Betty's Boxes!

Cloves, Oranges and Cinnamon!

I'm feeling festive, which means it's time to start obsessively baking Christmas Cakes!

I don't know about you, but since the dawn of time (or since my memory kicked in...which means I can't remember anything before the age of about 15 which should be quite worrying...but hey ho!) every Christmas I have stuck cloves into oranges and baked them with my dear old mum to make the house smell pretty and because I guess they look pretty...shrivelled burnt oranges with spikey cloves sticking out of them...

Anyway, the point I'm trying to get at is, most things that smell nice, taste nice to! So naturally I had to bake a Clove and Orange cake...

I basically made this recipe up as I went along; guessing at the method behind my madness. For example my first attempts at grinding up cloves failed gloriously as I was attempting to grind up whole cloves and of course the stalks refused to be ground...(interestingly, cloves are actually the shrivelled flowers from evergreen trees in Indonesia...don't you just love the random things you learn from my blog?! I am here to educate dear readers)

So yes, after my clove fail, I began to pain stakingly pick each bud from the stalk, throw it in a pestle and mortar until I had about a heaped teaspoon full of ground cloveage!

And here's the part where someone tells me you can buy ground cloves...(although I did discover the next morning that ground allspice smells suspiciously like ground cloves...)

Next comes the zest of an orange!

And I shall add here, I made up your basic cake mix first without adding vanilla extract as I didn't want it to over power or interfere with my prettyful cloves and orangeness...

(I used a 1 egg recipe; weight of 1 egg = weight of sugar, butter, flour...I knew maths would come in handy one day...)

Now, when's the cinnamon coming in?! I hear you cry. Well, in the buttercream of course...Make up as much or as little as you like, I advise making double what you need because you will eat it as you make it...and we do want some left! Then add a ton of cinnamon to taste! I added rather a lot because it didn't taste strong enough as I made it, but lo and behold the taste becomes stronger the longer you leave it, so if you add a ton and it still doesn't taste cinnamon-tastic; get someone to restrain you from adding more because a little goes a long way!

Bakey bakey...

Icey icey...

Cutty cutty...

My cake was demolished within 24 hours of it's birth, which is never a bad thing...

It tastes really lovely and festive; fruit cake without all the...fruit.

The cloves will put hairs on your chest if you add too much, so again, restrain yourself! Better to have a subtle of hint of it running through the cake and more orange flavour than have people spitting it across the room crying out various obscenities about the taste of cloves!

Enjoy!