We tried the baking box that delivers cake ingredients to your door

Forget about organic veg and recipe boxes, you can now get cake ingredients delivered straight to your door. Writer Emma Gibbs put a bake box from Yum2Three to the test.

Box cake mixes are hardly new – the likes of Betty Crocker and Dr Oetker have been gracing our supermarket shelves for decades. But, rightly or wrongly, there’s long been a bit of snobbery about them. Many bakers wouldn’t dream of starting a homemade cake with a pre-made mix, while others couldn’t countenance making a cake without one.

A number of companies are hoping to change attitudes with stylish delivered-to-your-door baking kits. These are in essence glorified box cakes – all the dry ingredients are provided, you just add eggs, butter, milk, and a minor bit of arm power – but what marks them out is that these aren’t just your bog-standard cakes. These are the kind of cakes you’d want to whip up for a special occasion – or just to show off.

But can you make a really decent cake out of a box? I decided to put one to the test.

What’s the deal?

Yum2Three claim to take the fuss out of finding that perfect cake recipe – and sourcing all the ingredients. You choose the cake from the selection on their website (ranging in price from £19.99 to £29.99), and they send out the ingredients and other baking essentials to you by Royal Mail.

I chose the Funfetti Fiesta cake, a vanilla sponge flecked with rainbow sprinkles and topped with bubblegum icing, melted chocolate and sweets.

What’s in the box?

Everything you need to make your chosen cake, except for perishable items – you’ll need to add butter, eggs and milk.

The Funfetti Fiesta kit contained: cake mix, sprinkles, candy melts, food colouring, frosting mix, Mentos Shakies, hundreds and thousands, a cake mould, a spatula, a piping bag and a wooden skewer.

Do you need to have baked before to use this bake box?

No. This is a really easy, straightforward kit. The instructions are detailed enough that everything is covered but it’s all done in easy-to-understand language. So you don’t need to worry if you can’t tell the difference between creaming, folding and mixing.

I used a handheld mixer to make the cake but it could easily have all been done by hand.

Is it really easier than cooking from scratch?

Making the cake itself was incredibly quick. One of the things I appreciated the most was not spending ages weighing out ingredients. In fact, the cake batter was made and in the oven in mere minutes.

The thing that took up the most time was just waiting for the cake and then the icing to cool at a couple of points in order to move onto the next stage.

Was it easy to decorate?

Surprisingly so. This is one of those cakes that looks impressive but is in fact really simple. It helped that the tools you needed – spatula, piping bag, etc – were provided.

Okay, so my decoration was a lot less polished than the cake pictured on the recipe card, but I was pretty pleased with how it turned out (even if I had to strategically place a few Mentos to cover up some patchy icing). Ultimately it looked nicely homemade.

Any problems?

The only real issue I had was one of my own making – I wasn’t concentrating enough when I was melting the chocolate and managed to make the chocolate seize. Thankfully, a little boiling water quickly brought it back to the right consistency.

How did it taste?

The cake itself tasted just as good as any completely from-scratch vanilla sponge I’ve made before – with the added bonus that the sprinkles made it look particularly exciting.

I hadn’t been sure about the bubblegum flavour icing so I was relieved to find that it was much more subtle than I’d expected and not at all overpowering. The cake was very, very sweet, however – much to the delight of my 5-year-old, though personally I would’ve been happy with the sugar levels toned down a little.

But did it taste like an actual, homemade cake?

Yes. You wouldn't have known that this had come from a kit, and thanks to my less-than-perfect icing skills, it looked the part too.

So, should I try a bake box?

Lazy bakers, rejoice. If you don't mind splashing a bit of cash, baking boxes are well worth a go when you need to create a celebration cake, but don’t have the time or the inclination to search through recipe books to find just the right one. 

I found it about 100% less stressful than last time I had to make a fancy birthday cake.

All photos in this piece by Emma Gibbs.

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