Baking with BakedIn

I baked something new last weekend: cinnamon swirls. As an experiment, I assure you, not because I quite fancied the idea of eating hot cinnamon swirls straight from the oven. And last night (as my twitter followers know) I baked a sticky toffee & date pudding/cake. To share with my customers of course.

It all started with a new range of home baking kits from BakedIn. We started stocking the kits at Tastes a few weeks ago. What appealed to me about the BakedIn products is their suitability to irregular bakers or those you don't bake the same thing repeatedly, but who want to bake from scratch.  These are not cake mixes, they are boxes of pre-measured ingredients. Which I've come to realise is a great idea. Here's why...

To make cinnamon swirls without the BakedIn kit you need strong white flour (approximately £2 for 1.5kg), icing sugar (£1.28 for 500g), dark muscovado sugar (£1.40 for 500g), caster sugar (99p for 500g), cinnamon (£1.99 for 33g), yeast (£1.15 for 125g) and salt along with the egg, butter and milk you need if you do have the kit.  I expect most people will have salt in their kitchen, and maybe one type of sugar. But unless you bake regularly you probably don't have the other ingredients, especially the strong flour and yeast which are mainly used to make bread.  So you'd spend about £7.80 on new ingredients assuming you had caster sugar and salt. Which is more than the kit costs. You would of course have enough ingredients to make multiple batches, so will save money when you make a second batch. But do you want to keep making the same thing, or would you prefer a sticky toffee pudding instead, or some chocolate brownies, or a lemon drizzle cake? In which case you'd need to buy a collection of other ingredients (self raising flour, dates, soft light brown sugar, bicarbonate of soda and vanilla beans for the sticky toffee alone). Then you'd be faced with where to store all the left over ingredients. Not to mention the baking tins.  I bake quite a lot, have a cupboard full of tins, but rarely the right one for the job! And it seems every new recipe requires an ingredient not already in the full-to bursting baking cupboard.

The BakedIn kits contain exactly the right amount of each ingredient. The things you add to the kits are the things most kitchens will have in them anyway for non-baking uses; eggs, butter, milk etc. So not only does it mean you don't need to weigh everything (in fact you don't need scales at all as the kits come with a handy butter measure so even the ingredients you add don't need to be weighed), it also means no spare ingredients to store or waste. They also come with the correct sized baking tins. I've made many sticky toffee puddings in the past, but was surprised by how much quicker it was to make with the BakedIn kit. That time saving came from not having to hunt through over stuffed cupboards to find the ingredients and tin! All I had to do was open one of the small packets right in front of me.

No left over ingredients. No collection of baking tins. No scales. All the ingredients to hand. Pretty much perfect for the erratic baker in a small kitchen.

The added beauty of the kits are they are not a packet mix cake. They don't contain dehydrated dairy products or any weird-sounding ingredients. They require more than adding liquid and mixing. So you are still baking. You can see exactly what ingredients are going into your bake. You carry out all the vital steps such as creaming butter and sugar. You can adapt the recipe to suit your taste, substitute ingredients if you want to (for example using dairy free "butter" and milk to make a dairy free version). They are also perfect for beginners and children.

And the results taste great! These are tried and tested recipes. No risk that you are buying a bunch of ingredients to make a recipe which fails to impress. Most people who have bought these kits in the three weeks since we started stocking them have returned to buy more. The proof really is in the pudding - here's mine: