Cake Decorating with Renshaw

I love baking and whilst I'm not the worlds best baker, I do think that I have some skill. I'm quite ambitious with my cake decorating and have spent many hours in the past trying to create something that looks as pretty as the image in my head. I'm not always successful but my family happily eat anything I bake and decorate. Renshaw sent some decorating products to us here at AMR for us to use for some Easter baking. Like me you might not have heard of Renshaw before but they have been supplying products to the trade for over 100 years and have now brought a range of products to market for home bakers and it was from this range that they sent me some bits to try.

I used the toffee flavour buttons first. They were really simple to use, you just cut off the corner and melt them in the microwave. Add to some cereal and put a spoonful into a paper case, let set and voila instant toffee flavoured cakes! The toffee flavour was really lovely, it wasn't too overpowering and I could see them very easily being used in a Millionaires shortcake or as a simple cupcake topping. There are four other flavours available (Smooth Strawberry, Yummy Yoghurt, Milk Chocolate and White Chocolate) and I'm going to be trying all of them.

The icing ribbon I'm going to be using on our Easter cake, it just unrolls which is brilliant as it is the sides of the cake I always have problems with when I am icing. For some reason I never seem to manage to keep it neat at the bottom of the cake, at least with the edible icing ribbon it will look pretty and be edible. I haven't made my Easter Cake yet, but you can be sure when I do that I'll post a picture somewhere!

The Snip and Swirl Chocolate icing is a brilliant idea because I hate washing my icing bags and with this once you have iced your cakes you just throw away the bag. I'm really bad at creating swirls on cupcakes, but for your amusement here is one of the cakes I decorated. Yes, I know what it looks like don't laugh too much, you might injure yourself.

Renshaw also sent some great products for the children to decorate cakes with too. The flavoured sugar dough will make some great cake toppings and some cute little animals for our Easter cakes and Top Ender is looking forward to creating some polka dots like on the package. I'm just not sure she realises that her cakes won't look as great as the ones on the packet!

The magic melting icing is a great idea, but I didn't get along with it very well. I made some sponge cakes which I cut up in to smaller pieces and then half dipped and half poured icing on to the cake to try and get it all covered. It was just too runny and and I couldn't get a good covering all over the cake, but as I said before my family happily eat anything I bake and they really loved the flavour of the icing.

The Renshaw products are available in supermarkets (I've seen them in Waitrose, Tesco, Sainsburys and Asda and I believe from what I read Morrisons sell them too) and you can follow Renshaw on Facebook and get some great inspiration from the Renshaw My Bakes website. Right now I'm heading back to the kitchen to see if I can pipe anything less offensive looking!

We were sent some Renshaw products to review.