British baking brand Stork has launched
its first product in almost a century, namely Stork Easy to Mix Baking
Liquid.
They explain : "The new easy-to-use format makes baking with children a
piece of cake and
so is great for a summer of baking and celebrations! It's also suitable
for vegetarians and vegans." Well, that sounded right up our street so I
entusiastically said yes when they offered to send us some to try out.
As you can see in the picture above, it comes out as a thick yellow
liquid. I poured some into the cake tin so that you could see what it
looks like before I added the other ingredients, but it is a replacement
for butter, not a ready to use cake mix, so you need to use sugar,
flour, eggs etc with it.
The baking liquid is really easy to measure out because it comes in a
bottle with a gauge on the side, which is really handy. The instructions
say you should use 110ml of baking liquid for every 100g of butter or
margarine. Stork did send me through some recipes to try out, but I
needed to knock up a quick sponge cake to use as a base for my Union
Jack icing (more about that in a moment) so I just adapted my usual
recipe, throwing in some vanilla essence and lemon juice to liven it up
because a quick taste of the raw batter tasted quite bland. I also added
some dolphin and flower sprinkles to the mix to make it all more
appealing to the kids !
I have to say, it was much easier to mix than when you have the
arm-breaking job of creaming together butter and sugar. For busy mums,
that's just a time-saving bonus but for anyone with a disability or
anyone elderly who may not have much strength in their arms, it does
take all the work out cake making.
I left the cakes to cook for the usual amount of time and they turned a
lovely golden colour. However, they looked a bit strange and sunken in
the middle.
They looked almost swampy in the centre so I thought they weren't cooked
through but a knife blade inserted in the middle came out clean so I
decided to bite the bullet and say they were done.
When I pushed out the round cake (from its silicon cake tin), I flipped
it over to see what it looked like underneath and decided it certainly
didn't look cooked enough.
As this close-up shows, the cake looks very buttery and greasy, so I
decided to put it back in the oven upside down for a further ten minutes
to see if this would sort it out.
I moved on to the square cake in a regular metal cake tin and it was
stuck solid. Although the outer edges were lovely and crispy, the inside
was a strange texture like butter-drenched breadcrumbs. As you can see,
it stuck like glue to the spatula when I tried to dislodge it from the
tin and came out in greasy lumps. Hmmm.
I left it to cool down completely, wondering if it would go more solid
as it cooled but - as you can see - all I managed to do was dislodge the
crispy edges of the cake in pieces. I think this is about the first
absolute disaster I've had in the kitchen for a while so it was actually
quite funny !
After a further ten minutes in the oven, I decided the other cake was as
good as it was going to get. It has a very sticky, dense, buttery
texture like honey cake, not the soft, light sponge cake I was hoping
for, but the kids and Madhouse Daddy Mike polished off nearly the whole
cake between them last night and today so it obviously got their seal of
approval ! I refused to use this cake as the basis for the icing kit
though because it would have been too much - it's already rich enough on
its own and certainly doesn't need any extra sugar and sweetness from
the sugar icing.
So - not sure really !! For ease of use, it's great. It produced a cake
that was declared delicious by everyone but that absolutely didn't
resemble the result I usually get with normal butter and the same
recipe. The failed square cake leads me to believe that this would make
absolutely wonderful gooey, buttery cookies. I think it would be good
for smaller cakes like cupcakes and muffins too, that would cook through
to the core properly and avoid the swampy centre that I got with the
big cakes.
http://madhousefamilyreviews.blogspot.com/2012/05/stork-easy-to-mix-baking-liquid-review.html
