Mary Berry dabbles in the dark arts of the shop-bought sponge
MARY BERRY has spent a lifetime teaching us that nothing tastes better than a homemade cake.
It may come as a surprise to fans, then, that the former Great British Bake Off judge is to launch a supermarket range of ready-made cakes, marketed at people who want to eat, in the words of the marketers, “without having to set foot in the kitchen”.
The products are based on some of Berry’s original recipes, including lemon drizzle, chocolate, carrot and banana fudge flavours.
“I am extremely proud of every single one of the cakes in my range. Each cake is a faithful representation of some of my favourite recipes, and they taste fantastic. I hope people enjoy eating them as much as we have enjoyed creating them,” she said.
As with other shop-bought products, the cakes contain emulsifiers and preservatives. In the past, Berry has praised food cooked from scratch as “free from unwanted extras”, and said she is passionate about home-made cakes “as you know exactly what has gone into them – there are no oxidants or emulsifiers, no e-numbers or additives of any sort”.
Berry’s original chocolate cake recipe consists of just a handful of ingredients: eggs, flour, sugar, butter, baking powder, cocoa powder and a little boiling water, with double cream, chocolate and apricot jam to make the ganache. The ingredients list for her ready-made Indulgent Chocolate Cake is three times the length, and includes glycerol, soya lecithin, diglycerides of fatty acids and potassium sorbate.
The Lemon Drizzle Cake, which has just six ingredients in its original form, has 18 in the pre-prepared version.
All the cakes have a shelf life of over two weeks.
Berry has recommended buying shop-bought filo pastry and pesto in the past, but never a shop-bought cake. Her mission on The Great British Bake Off was to get people to bake their own cakes, biscuits and puddings.
“I’m encouraging people to bake. I think that’s very good. It gets the family together. It’s something you can do at home, it’s creative and it doesn’t cost too much,” she has said.
However, now that she has left the show, to be replaced on Channel 4 by Prue Leith, Berry is diversifying from her roots as a home cook.
She is to present a new BBC series, Secrets From Britain’s Great Houses, in which she takes viewers on a tour of stately homes.
And she recently announced plans to publish a home maintenance guide featuring tips on table settings, how to polish silver, and “the perfect, no-fuss way to clean the loo”.
The new food range will be produced by the Finsbury Food Group, which turns out cakes on its factory production line at a rate of 18 per minute.
A spokesman for the company said: “The nation’s Queen of Cakes is launching her very first range of cakes this spring, giving cake-lovers the chance to eat genuine Mary Berry cakes without having to set foot in the kitchen.”