Angels Cakes & Bakes Blog

Hi all,

I have to firstly apologize for being so quiet for so long, I feel bad! let me say though that I have had a bit of a nightmare. We have been really busy (with one thing & another) here at Angels Cupcakes HQ, admittedly that is the good bit! But then we had an enquiry for a large order and unbeknown to the people who made the enquiry their whole address book was intercepted and they sent virus’s to everyone! Needless to say this was a nightmare for us because one thing led to another and we ended up having to order new hard drives, another back-up system etc. and some of the files were corrupt and irretrievable. So since our main system has been down we have been unable to access alot of our day-to-day information, passwords etc including coming on here to update our blog.

In the long run this has been good for us because firstly It has made us more vigilant about opening attachments from e-mails (even if we know the sender) and I would always recommend not opening an attachment unless you know you are being sent one and making sure (obviously) that your spam-ware/security is well up-to-date! And secondly because we have updated our operating system and programmes we now have a really efficient system which works much quicker, helping us to do stuff quicker and more efficiently. Happy days (now).

Anyways update & lecture over, but seriously if you do have important stuff on your hard-drive please BACK IT UP, BACK IT UP, BACK IT UP!

So, since we last got together we ran the study to see which products work best when baking sponge: we are not going to publish a research document which has been peer reviewed or anything and the study certainly was not stringent in all conditions but on the whole the outcome was this…..You get what you pay for! We found Lurpak butter worked better and tasted nicer both in the sponge and the buttercream that we made, compared to the cheaper versions. McDougals flour came out on top in the sponge stakes too! We are not endorsing (or being paid) to share these results by the way, but as professional cake-makers we wanted to make sure that we are giving our customers the best quality products by testing cheap versus expensive ones to see if it really does make a difference. We did find that when it came to sugar- there really was no difference but flour and butter were the most important factors when it comes to lighter sponger and more tasty results!

On the whole for lighter sponge cakes/cupcakes I would highly recommend McDougals flour, Lurpak butter, for both sponge and buttercream, and any sugar that you like, although we tend to use Tate & Lyle fairtrade icing and caster sugar. We did find that Aldi butter was also very nice and produced a lovely ivory coloured buttercream, but for lighter buttercream stick to Lurpak. We ALWAYS use free-range lion branded eggs, and we didn’t test eggs because we wouldn’t buy eggs that were from caged hens even for our study.

Anyway we hope this has been of some use to you all, we have found it really useful and will continue to use the best products we can find in our cakes. If you have any tips for bakers or any products you cannot live without please reply to this blog or join us on Twitter and let us know! Thanks for reading and we will post some lovely photos very soon!