Easy Marbled Cake

Yesterday's Feast magazine was a five-ingredient special. It's a lovely idea to cope with the bare minimum, and I started making today's cake with an intention of keeping it to 5 ingredients. Reader, I failed. I wanted to use the chocolate hazelnut spread from NuttVia, but the cake batter still looked a bit pale, when I mixed it in, so I sifted in one heaped teaspoon of cocoa powder.
And since I "broke" the 5-ingredients' postulation, I thought I might as well add a tablespoon of the egg liqueur to the vanilla half of the cake batter.
If you want to keep it more austere, don't use the liqueur and swap the milk for water.

Funnily enough, as I was mixing the dough, Eddie came into the kitchen and asked what I was baking. I said: "The Marbled Cake". He heard it as a Marvel cake, and was quite disappointed, when the cake was out of the oven: "What is Marvel about it? Are you going to decorate it?"
Sorry, son, it's not a Marvel cake.

Easy Marbled Cake
Ingredients:
1 pack of Betty Crocker Velvety Vanilla cake mix (425g)
110g butter, softened
3 medium eggs
180ml milk (semi-skimmed)
1tsp cocoa powder
60g chocolate hazelnut spread (I used NuttVia spread)
1tbsp Advocaat (optional)

In a medium sized mixing bowl beat the soft butter into the cake mix, and add the eggs, one at a time. Add milk, and mix well. Divide the cake batter into two parts.
Add two heaped tablespoons of hazelnut chocolate spread and sift in the cocoa powder as well.
If using the Advocaat liqueur, add it to the second bowl of cake batter.

Using a spray oil, spread the oil evenly inside the bundt cake tin.
Add blobs of white cake batter and chocolate cake dough intermittently in the cake tin to create a marbled effect.

Place the cake tin in the oven preheated to 180C. Bake for 45+ minutes. Check readiness with a wooden toothpick.
Allow to cool before removing out of the tin, and dust with the icing sugar.

It's a lovely cake to enjoy with a cup of tea or coffee. It's also very easy and quick to make, basically less than an hour from beginning to end.

Once he was over his disappointment of not seeing a Marvel cake, Eddie ate a piece and pronounced it tasty.

In this recipe I used NuttVia Hazelnut Spread which was one of the products in the latest Degustabox. It is 97% less sugar, compared to sugar-based market products, and is also palm oil free. It's made with NatVia, a naturally sourced sweetener. I haven't tried it before. I would like a higher cocoa content, and a slightly less sweet taste.
Average values: 79kcal per 15g (1tbsp).

Betty's Brookies

A few weeks ago I was reading Fab Freebies of the Week on Madhouse Family Reviews, as I do every weekend (and if you don't read this weekly post, you're missing on some super freebies), when I spotted the news that The Insiders were looking for testers for Betty Crocker products. This is the first time I heard of The Insiders, and we surely wanted to try some new Betty Crocker goodies and test recipes.
I have applied online, and was pleased to receive an email that we were selected as testers among many other applicants.
Soon before the midterm break we received a parcel with Betty Crocker products and vouchers.

I quite often buy cake mixes to bake with my guys. These kits are easy to use, and there is a wide selection of cakes to choose. Being in the kitchen with my kids also brings back memories of my own first bakes - using the cake mixes and learning to jazz them up, then moving onto baking from scratch.

There were a few recipe cards enclosed with the goodies, and we have chosen to bake a batch of brookies.
Brookies are apparently a brownie-cookie hybrid.
To make Brookies you will need a pack of Chocolate Chip Cookie Mix, a box of Chocolate Fudge Brownie Mix, 2 eggs, oil and water.
For the Cookies mix a pack of Choc chop cookie mix with 65ml of vegetable oil, 25ml water and 1 medium egg. In the second mixing bowl mix the brownie mixture with an egg, 1tbsp vegetable oil and 1tbsp water.
See the full recipe for Brookies at Betty Crocker's site.

Since we were testing the recipe, we did exactly as suggested. And here we got a bit of a problem. The brownie dough was still pretty dry, while the cookie dough was too runny.
We were supposed to roll the brownie and choc cookie dough into little balls, flatten them slightly and attach to each other. Now there was no way we could roll dry brownie and runny choc chip dough.

To solve the issue we added more oil and water to the brownie mix until we got the right consistency. We put brownie halves into the buttered cupcake tin and spooned the choc chip dough in. If we just put it on a lined baking sheet, the choc chip batter would have spread over.

The brownie part was still quite gooey while the choc chip part was already cooked. So, my verdict is: though a fun recipe, it still needs some tweaking.

Have you tried baking Brookies?

The recipe card did say you'd have some leftover dough. I had mixed the remains of both brownie and choc chip cookie dough together, added a big handful of oats and a bit of flour, rolled it out and cut out oat chocolate cookies.
Baked at 180C for about 12 minutes. They are still soft when you take them out of the oven.

Disclosure: As mentioned at the beginning of the post, I received a selection of Betty Crocker products as part of The Insiders programme for the purposes of testing and reviewing. All opinions are mine.

Whoop-whoop-whoopie pies (Betty Crocker Whoopie Pie mix review)

We were lucky to receive two boxes of Betty Crocker Whoopie Pie mix - in Double chocolate and Vanilla.

Ease of preparation: 5*

Taste: 5*

Earlier this morning Eddie and I decided to make some Whoopie Pies.

Here is Eddie helping Mummy to mix the chocolate icing. A happy child, a messy kitchen, lots of fun.

Whoopie pies were very easy to prepare, everything comes in a box in two packets: cake mix and icing mix, you just need to add an egg, water, oil and milk. Icing was a bit runny, though I measured milk and used a hand blender, so maybe a bit less of milk might be better. We also added a bit of jam to go with the chocolate filling to half of the pies, as suggested on the box, and that was lovely too.

Now for the most important part of the tester job:

And more tasting and testing. A hard job, but someone has to do it. :)

And the decision of the testing panel: excellent!

Daddy loved it, Mummy loved it, Eddie loved it, we left some for Sasha when he comes after school too.

A sunny cake for a sunny boy (Betty Crocker Sunny Lemon Cake Mix review)

There are mornings when you get up and think: "Time for a little something". So for no particular reason rather than having a slice of cake for our elevenses, Eddie and I decided to bake a cake.
Betty Crocker Sunny Lemon Mix with glaze is an easy and quick way to indulge yourself. You will need two eggs, a bit of a vegetable oil and water to add. It takes just over 35 minutes to bake.
Here is our cake.

Sunny Lemon Cake mix is available in Sainsbury's.

Eddie and I used the basic recipe, but suggestions on the box sound good too, so next time we'll try to bake it with mixed peel or finely chopped ginger.
The cake is moist, light, lemony and as you can see, much appreciated by the tester who takes his job seriously.