I spent most of this morning making Miss Frugal a giant cupcake birthday cake for her 11th birthday tomorrow and it definitely didn’t go to plan – in fact I’d say it went spectacularly wrong judging by the pile of burnt crusts I had to chop off it and the fact that half of the cake stayed stuck to the mould….
After seeing my disaster, I’m pretty sure you won’t want the recipe I used will you?
I didn’t think so 😉
I managed to rescue it with a good thick layer of icing and some sprinkles but even so, it’s certainly not my best work….
Which brings me to my question, is it always better to cook things from scratch?
I could have bought a giant cupcake from Tesco for £10 and it looks a lot better than the one that I made. It’ll probably taste better too and if you take into account the fact that it took me a couple of hours to make the cake myself and the cost of the ingredients than I might have been better spending the money and saving the time and hassle.
As it happens, I’m glad I made mine from scratch because that’s the way I like it but I could have saved myself an awful lot of time and effort for not much more money by buying the ready made version!
A couple of years ago, I made a Princess castle cake that I’m sure cost more than I could have paid someone to make it for me and it took me hours, literally hours to make and put together. And don’t even get me started on the stress of getting it to the church hall where the party was!
What do you think?
Is it really worth the time and effort of making your own? Do you buy ready made sometimes to save time even though it costs a little (sometimes a lot) more than making it yourself?