Sainsbury’s Eric Bakes provides instant party entertainment

October 5, 2010 Chopsy Baby

Parents stuck for a children’s birthday party entertainer may find a new range of home baking products just what they need instead.

This summer, Sainsbury’s launched 100 new or improved home baking products aimed at everyone from kids to the ultra serious baker.

The Eric/Erica Bakes range is ideal for a party of children. The cheap children’s home baking range will serve as a fun activity, the products bake in exactly 12 minutes and the end result – which they get to take home – will work out cheaper than a party bag each.

Photo: The Stained Glass Window Biscuits

Talentless baker Jen Smith, tested out a range of the elephant themed children’s baking products for Chopsy Baby. Aided by three-year-old easily bored Sidney, the end results proved to be surprising.

Eric Bakes Mini Vanilla Cupcakes
£1.29

This simple and totally fool proof mix needs only one egg, butter and milk to be added. The mix creates 12 mini cup cakes which can be decorated with strawberry buttercream icing and white chocolate swirls. Mums without cooking scales need not panic. When getting to the part requiring the weighing out of two ounces of butter, we managed to hazard a reasonably good guess.

When finished, the cakes looked and tasted amazing.

Erica Bakes Mini Double Chocolate Muffins
£1.29

This non-sickly mini chocolate muffin recipe needs one egg, milk and oil to be added. We forgot to add the oil but this didn’t seem to make a huge difference.

Eric Bakes Mini Butterfly Cakes
£1.29

Just add one egg, butter and water. As we still had the milk out from the previous recipe, we ditched the water and added a splash of milk instead.

Only grandmas seem to be able to create the perfect butterfly cakes. Though the recipe was perfect, only those with true talent can cut the top off the cake to form a butterfly. Our attempts looked more like dead squashed moths. Living dangerously, we simply spooned the buttercream on top the mini cakes and sprinkled the sugar strands over instead. Job done, tasted heavenly.

Eric Bakes Double Chocolate Cookies
£1.69

Eric’s recipe certainly gives Millie a run on cookies. This ready to bake dough just needed rolling and chocolate drops to be added. The cookies came out like shop bought ones.

Eric Bakes Gingerbread Men
£1.69

Another ready to bake product. There can be few cake shops selling gingerbread men this tasty. The ginger is not overpowering and the little biscuit men look great piled up on the plate.

Eric Bakes Stained Glass Window Biscuits
£1.69

This is a really interesting ready to bake product. Half the dough is chocolate, the other half is banana. You separate the two, roll and cut out cookies as normal, then cut an additional hole in the centre and pop in a boiled sweet. When cooking, the sweet melts and a stained glass effect is created.

This clever idea looks really effective but is also the one ready to bake product that caused us an issue. Baking paper is needed to line the biscuit baking tray. As we did not have any to hand, and doing that living dangerously thing, we soldiered on with out it.

Out of the seven biscuits we managed to cut from the dough, sadly, only four made it. The other three spent many hours soaking in the sink until the welding finally came away.

The finished stained glass window biscuit looked brilliant and was achieved so easily.

Photo: Our finished baking – all decorating completed by child

All recipes needed just 12 minutes to cook, not a second more. We ignored the instructions and cooked everything at 180 degrees.

Though many will believe ready to bake products are for the lazy, it is worth bearing in mind that they can be a cheap option for irregular bakers. You don’t have to clutter your kitchen cupboards up with bags of flour and sugar you may never use again.

Young kids get bored quickly. Involving preschoolers in the kitchen is a great learning opportunity, but frankly they want to do the fun bit with the eggs, rolling pin then get creative with the sugar sprinkles. The packs are relatively mess free and are quick to charge through before little ones get fidgety and eat the raw egg.

When finished and presented on a plate, the cakes and biscuits actually looked worthy of a primary school cake sale. They looked as if they had been baked by a reasonably competent baker and tasted marvellous.

The Sainsbury’s Eric/Erica Bakes are ideal for:

A baking birthday party – Young party guests can have some baking fun as the cheap entertainment and get to take their cakes or cookies home in a party bag at the end.

Getting youngsters involved in the kitchen – The packs are quick, easy and produce impressive results.

As a gift – Ditch the impersonal Birthday/Mother’s Day/Father’s Day presents and get children to bake biscuits, then make and decorate the packaging for them to go in.