Planet Veggie

Betty Crocker may well bake, but it’s not something I do very often. Not cakes, anyway. Let’s see… how many cakes can I remember ever making? Oh, I know: one. Yes, one. It was a very pretty one though – look. Pretty on the outside, at least. You can see from the other photos the horror it was before I slapped cream and fruit all over it.

Betty Crocker, though, makes bakers out of everyone. Even me. I’ve got to admit, I was sceptical about the quality of the cakes when Better Crocker invited me along to a cake decorating class. I thought a cake out of a packet wouldn’t be any good but I was soon to be proved wrong.

On arrival, we were given a talk about the history of Betty Crocker and were introduced briefly to some of their products, before getting down to what we were all there for – baking and decorating cakes and, more importantly, eating what we’d made.

This may be common knowledge to most people but in my cake ignorance, it never occurred to me that you could combine cake mixes to make a whole new cake. We were shown how to mix together the Betty Crocker Red Velvet Cake Mix with the Betty Crocker Classic Vanilla Cake Mix to make a beautiful marble cake.

While our marble cake was baking in the oven, we whipped up a batch of Chocolate Chip Cookie Mix, and when they were ready, they were crumbled and mixed up with the Chocolate Fudge Brownie Mix to make a delicious cookie/brownie combo (a ‘crownie’ perhaps?)

At the very most, all you’ll need to add to the Betty Crocker cake mixes are eggs, oil, water and butter, and some (the Chocolate Chip Cookie Mix, for example) only need water. Just how simple can you get?

Unfortunately, the heat of the room meant I had to leave before the most fun part of the evening – the decorating and eating bit – but as I left, our hosts handed me a goody bag full of Betty Crocker products and the next day I made some Chocolate Chunk Muffins (all you need is an egg, some water and a muffin tray – everything else, including the muffin cases, is in the packet). Look how gorgeous they turned out.

I’m ashamed to say I’d never eaten a muffin before – not one of these American-style chocolately ones, anyway – only our English muffins, but the Meat Eater said these were as good as any muffin he’d had before.

For more information and to see the whole range, visit the Betty Crocker website.