I was a little skeptical about the cake to begin with.  One reason is because I have never had a good result from any recipe I’ve tried from Donna Hay.  I think the reason for this is that Donna Hay is a food stylist, not a chef!  Another reason I was skeptical about this cake is because the entire thing contains 750 grams, or 1.7 pounds, of butter.  That is a lot of butter.  Unfortunately, I still wanted to make it and my reasoning was that it was just a birthday cake, we don’t eat that much butter all the time!

I was also skeptical because the way this cake is made involves a method I have never used before.  Donna Hay calls it “melt and mix”.  250 grams of butter is melted, then the entire list of ingredients is dumped together into the mixing bowl at once and then mixed.  This is not the normal way to make cake.  This method is used in most of the birthday cake/cupcake recipes in Donna Hay’s kids’ magazine.  I want to say right now that I will never make a cake this way again!  There are definitely other things I want to try in the magazine, but I will be using my own favorite cake recipes instead of Donna Hay’s.

The rest of the butter, 500 grams, is then used to make the frosting.  This method of making the frosting is pretty average, except that it involves an extremely long beating time.  First, the butter is beat for 6-8 minutes, or until pale and creamy.  The icing/confectioners’ sugar is then added, along with some vanilla and milk, and then the frosting is beat for 10-15 minutes, or until light and fluffy.  My frosting started out fine, and tasted fine.

But….. I’m going to mostly blame the problem of the frosting on how cold it is in Sydney.  Since a lot of houses do not have central air conditioning/heating in Sydney, it is often quite cold in the house.  Most mornings in our house start out at about 14C, or 57F.  As you could imagine, it is difficult to get softened butter when making cake, cookies or frosting!  Anyhow, because at this temperature butter likes to stay quite solid, my finished frosting refused to stay light and fluffy.  The frosting started to turn yellowish (perhaps because there was 500 grams of butter in it!) and became quite difficult to spread as it hardened up due to the cold ambient temperature.  The frosting was also very, very greasy (again, because of the butter) and left a thick layer of greasiness on whatever touched it, including our fingers.

The photo below shows the yellowness of the frosting, yet it should have been bright white.

What I first noticed about the cake itself is that the layers didn’t rise very much in the oven.  So my cake wasn’t very high and I couldn’t get 3 rings of marshmallows around the cake (although I could have, but by the time I had gotten around to putting the marshmallows on the frosting I was too disappointed to continue!).  As I cut into the cake, I noticed how dense it was and how it didn’t even produce crumbs.  The cocoa powder and pink food coloring I had stirred into portions of the batter had obviously not gotten thoroughly mixed because there were still small lumps of white batter baked into the pink and chocolate parts of the cake (as seen in the photo below).  The taste was not bad, although I would still consider it below mediocre.  The kids didn’t eat even half of their slice of cake.

Luckily the cake didn’t ruin the party – I also had a cupcake decorating station, ham and butter heart-shaped sandwiches, carrot matchsticks and cucumber wedges.  The girls played with My Little Pony, watched a My Little Pony movie and played outside.  My daughter got some neat presents that she was so happy with, she even took some to sleep with her in bed that night!

I love the look of the cake in the Donna Hay magazine, and while I won’t ever be using any “melt and mix” cake recipe or vanilla frosting from that magazine, I would love to try to replicate the cake with my own recipes.  I’d like to try a much lighter cake recipe firstly, but the biggest change would be the frosting.  I’d prefer to use an egg white-based frosting with no butter to get a lovely, soft marshmallowy flavor and texture.  I think my changes could produce a much better result.

You could just say that this whole cake problem was my fault – I must have done something wrong.  But I truly don’t think so.  I’m no stranger to making cakes, as you can see just by looking through my recipes, and most of my cakes and cupcakes always turn out just fine.  What I’d like to know though is if anyone else tries this particular recipe (posted below), or any of the “melt and mix” cake recipes in Donna Hay’s kids’ magazine, please let me know how it works for you.

Basic Melt And Mix Rainbow Cake
Adapted from Donna Hay magazine’s kids’ issue 2010
Makes one 20cm (8-inch) 3-layer cake, serves 8-10

Ingredients
2 1/2 cups (375g) plain (all-purpose) flour, sifted
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder, sifted
1 3/4 cups (275g) caster (superfine) sugar
250g unsalted butter, melted
4 eggs
1 1/2 cups (375ml) milk
1 teaspoon vanilla essence
1/4 teaspoon pink food coloring
2 tablespoons cocoa, sifted

Method
Preheat oven to 160C (325F).  Place flour, baking powder, sugar, butter, eggs, milk and vanilla in a large bowl and mix until well combined.  Divide the mixture into 3 equal portions.  Set aside 1 portion.  Place the second portion in a bowl with the pink food coloring and stir to combine.  In another bowl, mix to combine the third portion with the cocoa.  Pour into 3 lightly greased and lined 20cm round cake tins and bake for 40-50 minutes or until cooked when tested with a skewer.  Cool in tins for 5 minutes before turning onto a wire rack to cool completely.

Basic Vanilla Butter Icing
Adapted from Donna Hay magazine’s kids’ issue 2010
Makes enough for one 20cm (8-inch) 3-layer cake

Ingredients
500g unsalted butter, softened
4 cups (640g) icing (confectioner’s) sugar
4 tablespoons milk
2 teaspoons vanilla essence

Method
Place the butter in the bowl of an electric mixer and beat for 6-8 minutes or until pale and creamy.  Add the icing sugar, vanilla and milk and beat for a further 10-15 minutes or until light and fluffy.

Assembly

Ingredients
mini marshmallows, halved, to decorate

Method
Starting with the chocolate layer, spread a quarter of the vanilla icing over the cake using a palette knife.  Top with the pink layer of cake, ice with another quarter of the icing and finish with the vanilla layer, using the remaining icing to ice the whole cake.

Decorate the sides of the cake with the marshmallows.  This is how it should look:

Donna Hay’s chocolate cupcakes from the kit were pretty good, but I was disappointed in the frosting.  There wasn’t enough of it, and it turned out much lighter in color than the frosting on the box, which was so dark it looked like fudge.  Also, the wrappers kept peeling away from the cupcakes, which was quite annoying.

I wasn’t much happier with the brownies.  All that is required to make the brownies is some butter and eggs, then you whisk it into the dry ingredients from the kit.  After whisking, you mix the chocolate chunks in.

Now, the whisking was quite difficult!  The mixture was so thick that it got caught in my whisk and I couldn’t whisk it properly.  I would suggest using a spoon instead.

My next problem was that I couldn’t get the brownies to get properly cooked without the edges becoming too hard.  My brownies looked under-baked in the middle and over-baked on the edges, which were very hard.

And once again, my end product does not look like the picture on the box, just as in the chocolate cupcakes.  In fact, the other recipes I have made from Donna Hay never end up looking like the photos (this includes a chicken dish and a meatballs dish).  Which is a little odd.

The brownies tasted nice on the day of baking, although I have had better, and also I have made better from scratch.  But I did not like them at all on the second day.  They became stale rather quickly and even a short blast in the microwave didn’t refresh them well enough for me.

While I did recommend Donna Hay’s Chocolate Cupcake Kit, I wouldn’t recommend her Molten Chocolate Chunk Brownie Mix.  I can only hope the Chocolate Chip Cookie Kit will end my disappointment with the previous two kits, especially the brownies!

Have you tried the Molten Brownie Kit?  What did you think?

You can find Donna Hay’s dessert kits at Thomas Dux and David Jones (for $13.95),  Little Betsy Baker (for $14.95) and Donna Hay’s website (for $15.95).

My take?  I wouldn’t pass up a slice of cake made from a box, but when it comes to making a cake, I’d rather do it from scratch.  I also think that it doesn’t take much longer to make a cake from scratch than it does from a box, so if you’ve got the ingredients to make a cake from scratch, do it!

There’s something therapeutic and calming for me when making a cake from scratch (when my kids are not “helping” me, that is!) and I just can’t get that same feeling with a box cake mix.  That said though, I do love box brownie mixes!

Anyway, last week I stopped in a relatively new shop called Thomas Dux, which sells a lot of organic and gourmet products.  The main aisle I was interested in was the baking aisle, and there I found a range of Donna Hay box mixes – cupcakes, cookies and brownies.  What intrigued me about these mixes is that instead of the usual oil, eggs and water that you’d find in an average box mix, the Donna Hay box mixes required butter, eggs and milk.  I picked up the chocolate cupcake box!

Inside is a packet of cupcake mix, of icing mix and 12 stylish cupcake liners (I actually got 13).

The process of making the batter was a combination of doing it from scratch and from a box mix; first you cream the butter, then add all the dry mix, the eggs and milk and beat until smooth.

I found that I could fill the liners pretty full to get exactly 12 cupcakes.  They puffed up nicely in the oven, but when I took them out the tops flattened out, much to my dismay (I like domed tops).

The icing was very easy to make as well, just beat everything together until smooth and creamy.  However, my frosting ended up much lighter in color than what was pictured on the box.  The picture on the box looked like the icing was dark and fudgey, but mine was light and creamy.  This was disappointing, but it still tasted nice.

The moment of tasting – they are very good!  Definitely not a box mix taste to be had.  They are heavy, a little dense and so moist.  They were also very easy to crumble.  I preferred the taste of these straight out of the refrigerator as they tasted just like a mud cake this way!

The most peculiar thing about these cupcakes that I experienced is that the liners pulled away from the cupcakes soon after baking.  While I didn’t mind much since they were just for me and my family, this surely would not have impressed guests as it looked like we had unwrapped all the cupcakes!  I have no idea why they did this.

This box mix is considerably more expensive than your average Betty Crocker or Duncan Hines mixes at up to $15.95 for 12 cupcakes.  If you are after quality and taste however, I would definitely recommend Donna Hay’s cupcake kits.  I plan on trying all of her kits eventually.  I do believe these kits are only available in Australia, unfortunate for my international readers, but lucky for my fellow Aussies!

You can find Donna Hay’s cupcake, cookie and brownie mixes at Thomas Dux grocery stores (for $13.95),  Little Betsy Baker (for $14.95) and Donna Hay’s website (for $15.95).  If you try, or have tried, any of her mixes, please leave a comment and let me know!