I’m lucky that baking mixes can last a long time because I bought this in June and only got around to making it now! If you remember, I tried Primark’s cookie mix a while back… to disastrous results. So I was a little bit worried about Hema’s cake kit and my own baking skills; I’ve not had much time to bake recently. But since I ran into a free day thanks to the concept of “birthday leave”, I decided to try making this cake. Spoiler alert: I failed, making this a post worthy of the category name.

It looks intimidating because it looks much nicer than anything I’ve made. In fact, it reminds me of the IKEA Princess Cake.

The cake-baking process was quite easy. All I needed to do was to add 3 eggs and 20ml of water to the cake mix and beat on high for 8 minutes. The part where I messed up was in the baking: my oven is small (the paper cake tray fits my baking tray with no room to spare) and it tends to run hot, so I set my timer for 20 minutes instead of the 30 minutes recommended. But after just 17 minutes, I noticed the cake was brown on top. It passed the toothpick test and so I brought it out.

I was actually quite happy about the cake! Until it started sinking. I’m not sure if it’s due to insufficient whisking (though I did whisk it for the stated 8 minutes) or if it’s because I took it out too early or because my oven has an issue. Either way, it sank and that meant that I couldn’t slice the cake in half to spread icing in the middle. So instead, I cut the cake in half.

The next step was to make the icing. For some reason, the icing turns into a kind of gel after whisking with milk. The buttercream had the same issue (but tasted more like butter). Taste-wise, it tasted like jelly icing sugar.

The final step is to put a layer of marzipan on the cake. I bought the marzipan from M&S, tried a little bit, and then realised I don’t like marzipan. There’s just something about the almond note that is a bit too much for me. We also had issues rolling out the marzipan, which is why the finished product looks like this:

We only managed to cover about half the cake, and then I gave up. I have to admit that the half that’s covered looks a lot neater than the half that isn’t.

In terms of taste, the cake itself is actually pretty good! Unfortunately, the icing isn’t that great and marzipan is only nice in small quantities. My family also agrees, which means that I didn’t actually need to decorate the cake.

So, would I buy this again? Not this exact one, but I would be open to open to trying other baking kits from Hema. I would also take the kits as a time saver rather than a fool-proof baking kit; I would, for example, have liked to know more about how to bake the cake so that it doesn’t sink.