Easy baking with Craft and Crumb review and giveaway

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I have written many times about the struggle I have with productivity. Working from home is so intensive that I struggle to find the time to take on additional tasks. Sadly one such task is organising birthdays. Thankfully this year, baking kits from the award winning Craft and Crumb website have come to the rescue. Don’t get me wrong, I want my girls to have the best birthdays possible. But they are SO demanding! When it’s my husband’s birthday, he’s happy with a chocolate cake. And I love making chocolate cake. We put some sweets on it so the girls are happy, everyone’s a winner. But when it is one of the girls’ birthdays, they want some incredible creation and I just haven’t got the time.

Introducing Craft and Crumb

Call me old fashioned, but I’m not a huge fan of buying a supermarket cake for birthdays. I want people to know that I’ve made an effort. Put in the time and thought to make them a cake. I’m not great at presents, I’m not really a materialistic person so I struggle to know what people will want. But everyone loves cake.

The problem is, this year all Lia wanted for her birthday was a dinoroserous. No, not a dinosaur – not a rhinoceros either, for the record. Just a dinoroserous. Well, she hasn’t got one of those. If anybody sees a dinoroserous wandering the streets, please catch it and deliver it to Lia. But in the meantime, we had many a discussion about cake. And she decided she would rather like a dinosaur cake – purely on the basis that I couldn’t get her a dinoroserous one of course.

But sadly, we’re back to my lack of time. I probably could have put together a rather rubbish dinosaur cake but luckily, I didn’t have to. Craft and Crumb is the brainchild of two mums who were in the same boat as me. Wanting to make homemade birthday cakes, but struggling for time. So, they developed a range of cakes that are easy and quick to make, but they look and taste beautiful.

The Dinosaur Land Cake from Craft and Crumb

Craft and crumb make both complete cake kits and cake decorating kits. I went for the Dinosaur Land complete cake kit. This arrives in a nice big box, with virtually everything you need to make it. You receive all the ingredients except for eggs, milk and butter. You also receive disposable cake cases to bake it in, an icing mix, biscuits to decorate it and even some little plastic dinosaurs and trees to make dinosaur land complete.

Making the cake was simple. I had to tip the Craft and Crumb ingredients into a bowl and add the eggs and butter. Then a good mix with an electric mixer and it was done. I was told to make it in two batches to ensure I got the right amounts for each cake layer and cupcake. This made perfect sense. Then I just had to bake it, cool it and get on with decorating.

If I’m perfectly honest, I didn’t find the cake making process that much simpler than usual. This is purely because I usually use a very simple chocolate cake recipe that is easy and tastes great. But where the Craft and Crumb kit comes into its own is if you’re not really a baker. My husband isn’t a baker, although he did give it a go once. I don’t really want to talk about it but it’s safe to say it wasn’t pretty. But if I gave him this cake kit, I am convinced he’d be able to bake a masterpiece. Come to think of it, so would Libby.

Craft and Crumb decorations

For me, the decorating part of the kit was where Craft and Crumb came into their own. The icing was just as easy to make as the cake itself. The chocolate icing mixture was provided and I all I had to do was mix it with butter and milk.

I followed the instructions to arrange the cake and cupcakes as suggested and ice the cake. Then, I just had to put the chocolate fingers around the edge, crush up the biscuits and arrange the dinosaurs and trees on top. And I think you’ll agree, it looks pretty impressive. The only slight issue I had was that there weren’t quite enough finger biscuits to go around the outside of the cake, I’d probably buy a few more if you are going to use this kit.

Win a brand new Craft and Crumb biscuit kit

Craft and Crumb have recently launched a new range of biscuit kits in their online shop. They come with everything you need to bake beautiful rocket or magic wand biscuits. They have kindly given me one biscuit kit to give away. The winner can choose between rockets or magic wands. You can enter using the Rafflecopter below. Please read my competition terms and conditions before entering. Don’t forget to check out my other competitions too, there are some brilliant prizes up for grabs.

a Rafflecopter giveaway