If there is one type of product certain to send my geeky heart a-flutter, it’s bakeware. My kitchen is full of everything from Portal cookie cutters to Star Wars cake pans so when Lakeland (one of my favorite kitchenware stores) announced their exclusive collection of Doctor Who products, I may have danced for joy. Lakeland kindly sent along a sample of products from the collection and I have spent the past few weeks trying them all out.
The first products I tried out were the Dalek cupcake wraps. These are simple cardboard wraps and toppers that are placed around a finished cupcake, transforming them into Daleks. The £9.99 pack contains 24 wraps in four colors—a good number for a child’s birthday party. As it happened, a few days after receiving them I was baking cupcakes for my village fair so I decided to try them out there. I stuck with the white, red, and blue wraps simply because I didn’t want to spend the extra time mixing up orange food dye when I was already busy. The wraps are very easy to use but I did find a few problems with them. First, even at its smallest, the wrap was significantly larger than the cupcake, making it very hard to pick up, especially for clumsy kiddie fingers. I ended up using a craft knife to make another slit further around the wrap; not a major problem but one I could happily have done without in the busy prep time for the fair. Any of us who have catered a child’s birthday party knows that convenience is key and adding in an extra job was more than a little annoying. Secondly, to make your cupcakes look anything like the pictures on the packet you would need an extraordinary quantity of icing on top. I was using standard size cupcake cases filled to the brim with cake and what I felt was a lot of icing, especially for a child’s cake, yet my cupcakes still didn’t come close to the catalogue pictures, and the Daleks ended up looking somewhat squished. I can only assume the wraps are designed to be used with larger-size muffin cases, as this would help to eliminate both problems. Naturally this would also result in the cakes being rather big, especially to give to a child. Regardless of these issues the cakes went down a storm at the fair. I saw lots of children (and adults) dragging people over to the cake stall to point them out and they sold out rapidly.
Next I tried the cookie cutters. These come in sets of two each priced at £4.99 and you have the choice of Dalek and Sontaran, K9 and Cyberman, and the TARDIS and a Weeping Angel. I’d prefer if they were sold individually as this double-pack method means anyone wanting to make the TARDIS and a Dalek must purchase two additional cutters they may not want. (Perhaps that’s the idea?) The cutters are all spring-loaded to make removing the cookie dough easier, and each one is incredibly detailed, especially the Dalek. This detail means that the cutters get sticky very quickly; I found myself dunking them into flour between every use to prevent sticking. This was especially helpful with K9’s thin and fragile tail. My cookies came out with a varying degree of success. My TARDIS cookies were especially wibbly-wobbly, but this can be at least partly attributed to baking with a three-year-old and partly to my own lack of skill at making cookies stay straight. I generally found the TARDIS to produce the least defined results while the Sontaran and Dalek cutter provided exceptionally defined cookies. The level of detail made icing them very fiddly. I used a tiny piping nozzle (Pampered Chef number two for those baking aficionados) which worked well but even that felt a little clunky in some parts. If you’re hoping to reproduce the pictures on the website make sure you have a good piping kit and a small nozzle on hand. The results do look fabulous even though I didn’t use any color on my batch. If you have the time and the patience, you could produce something truly spectacular.
Some of my favorite baking items are my collection of chocolate molds. The £4.99 TARDIS chocolate mold can make 12 chocolates in the same designs as the cookie cutters and has the added cool factor of being shaped like the TARDIS itself. The shapes are quite shallow making nice thin chocolates that won’t break your teeth if eaten direct from the fridge. They’re solid enough, though, to easily remove them from the silicone mold. Each one is also highly detailed; surprisingly so for tiny chocolates measuring only about an inch tall). I think this is one of the most flexible items in the collection, especially as it’s one of the lower cost items as well. The chocolates can be used on top of cupcakes, to decorate larger cakes, or just eaten as they are. If you use white chocolate you could even dye them–blue chocolate TARDIS chocolates, anyone?
The final product I tried was the cake pan. I was fairly dubious about this one simply because the catalogue photos didn’t look all that spectacular; if they can’t make the cakes look great for expertly photographed promotional photos, then what hope does the average home baker have? The cake pan creates six dome-shaped cakes with the characters as raised figures on top. The first issue comes with the pans themselves. The characters are fairly small and detailed so you really need to grease them well; a bit of butter rubbed on with a paper towel just isn’t going to cut it. I used Wilton’s Cake Release which has never once let me down. Even so, you need to be careful that the product doesn’t pool in the indentations, since that will prevent the cake mix from filling them. I found this to be a particular issue with K9’s tail. The cakes are also an odd size; significantly larger than a cupcake or even a large muffin but smaller than a full sized cake. It makes them a little too big for eating in a single serving but also awkward to use as a full size cake. And who wants half a Cyberman in their party bag? As I predicted from the photos, the cakes produce less than impressive results. Icing them helps but because they are dome shaped, the designs arch away from you making them difficult to ice and also somewhat awkward to actually see. Out of the collection, this is definitely the one I’d say to avoid. Personally, I’d simply invest in the cookie cutters and use them to cut fondant icing shapes to decorate a regular cake.
There has been a lot of thought put into these products, which is to be expected from a company with such a bakeware and cookery pedigree as Lakeland. The items in the collection are not cheap, but they’re pretty reasonably priced compared to other products in the store and most importantly, they produce good, consistent results except for the cake pan. If you have a child who loves Doctor Who or if you just want to impress your friends next time they visit, then I cannot recommend the collection highly enough. The range is exclusive to Lakeland but the store ships worldwide. If you do order any of the products, let us know how you get on with them. There’s nothing we at GeekMom like more than drooling over pictures of delicious geeky treats. Yum!