Christmas Jumper Cake Bake Off #everyoneswelcome

 

I consider myself very lucky that I do not have any food intolerances. I have children who are fussy, but thankfully neither of them or my partner have to follow any special diets. However, for many, many people not being able to eat foods which contain gluten or dairy, for example, it is a way of life and it must be hard at times to live with.

Thankfully, nowadays supermarkets and restaurants offer a fantastic range of gluten and dairy free products to eat. There is so much more choice widely available for all types of dietary requirements to cover different food intolerances and allergies. After all, no one wants to feel excluded from eating establishments or have to make very thing from scratch all of the time, so it must be liberating that supermarkets such as Tesco offer such a variety of free from foods.

With it being Christmas, with friends and family coming together to celebrate which mostly involves drinking and eating, you want everyone to feel welcome and not feel left out just because they need free from food to eat. Therefore, this Christmas, Tesco have championed a campaign entitled #everyoneswelcome to celebrate that anyone, no matter what their special diets are, can be catered for at their stores.

When it comes to baking, making free from cakes can be costly as the individual free from ingredients can be expensive, as they tend to cost more than regular ingredients. Tesco have come up with a great solution to this problem, as they have issued some festive cake baking kits for Christmas. We were sent a Christmas Jumper Cake Kit which comes with all you need, bar eggs and dairy free spread, to make a jolly festive jumper cake.

The kit also includes a full method printed onto the back of the box and on the inside you can cut out out a stencil to make your sponge jumper shape with.

For someone who is not great at free hand cake cutting for shoes, this stencil is a life saver!

We decided to have a littlest of fun and have a Christmas jumper cake bake off, so we baked 3 cakes with the idea of myself and both of my boys making our own cake jumper creations, and getting Daddy to choose his favourite. 

However, one of the sponges got a huge chunk bitten out of it by our dog, so my entry was removed from the contest and it became a bake off for Burton and Jenson instead. This was probably just as well as I had not planned my cake design at all, whereas both boys drew their designs on paper before they started cake decorating. 

The cake kits come with icing sugar, and it suggests that you add (dairy free) butter to it to make a buttercream. However, we decided to just add water and food colouring to make icing. 

So here are the finished Christmas cake jumpers :

Jenson’s is a snowman cake with (skittle) baubles.

Burton’s is a Santa coat complete with a marshmallow beard. 

Daddy and I were unable to choose a favourite, so we awarded them both Christmas star bakers instead.

The baking kit was so easy to use and the cooked sponge was delicious, light and not at all dry as I thought it might be, you know being gluten and dairy free. It was as good as any home-made cake really, in terms of flavour and texture.

Tesco sent me a lovely pack of baking goodies with which to help with baking our cakes, and I was also sent a fantastic Christmas jumper cake with a matching festive jumper – I love it! Thank you 🙂

I was asked to try the baking kit for the purpose of a review.