I know this ship will have probably sailed by the time I catch up but....
I used to make cakes professionally. Let’s break this down, umm, forensically, shall we?
I cannot, like others, find a 425g tin of custard for sale online. I could find old references to a 425g tin from Asda so seems reasonable to assume could be the tin used here, though I am not sure Asda really counts as a local convenience store. But, <shrug>, it seems that as a rule our friend Jack doesn’t like to shop elsewhere.
http://www.supermarketownbrandguide.co.uk/viewitem.php?tablename=tinned_sweet&id=00030
I can’t find it on sale now. I wonder if they’ve switched from tinned custard to tetrapak custard, as the ambient (sorry, I work in food industry so doesn’t seem a weird word to me) products I can find are all tetrapak now.
I’m going to use the ingredients from one of those anyway. Listed here:
Reconstituted Skimmed Milk,
Reconstituted Buttermilk, Water, Sugar, Modified Maize Starch, Palm Oil,
Milk Proteins, Coconut Oil, Flavouring, Stabiliser (Triphosphates), Colours (Annatto, Curcumin)
Mmmmmmm, delicious Triphosphates. Anyway, onward.
It may be that there was, once upon a time, back in the olden times of 2019 (when Tin Can Cook was published) a 375g bag of vanilla cake mix available. Indeed maybe there still is, but I can’t find one. I can find a rather posh salted caramel one at that weight that makes 6 cupcakes (so I assume probably includes icing) and a Dr Oetker lemon drizzle traybake one (again + icing). Like I say, such a thing may exist, but it seems not to be the most readily available size. That seems to be 400g.
For this analysis, I’m going to take the Asda 400g Vanilla Cake Mix as my standard. Seems reasonable right? Ingredients here:
Fortified
Wheat Flour [
Wheat Flour, Calcium Carbonate, Iron, Niacin (B3), Thiamin (B1)], Sugar, Palm Oil, Dried Glucose Syrup, Raising Agents (Potassium Carbonates, Glucono-Delta-Lactone, Calcium Phosphates), Rapeseed Oil, Flavouring, Emulsifiers (Lactic Acid Esters of Mono- and Diglycerides of Fatty Acids, Propane-1, 2-Diol Esters of Fatty Acids, Mono- and Diglycerides of Fatty Acids),
Skimmed Milk Powder
Ah, with these Diglycerides of Fatty Acids, you’re really spoiling us.
Ok, so I am being a bit of a dick. I love me a bit of ready made custard, and I eat all kinds of crap from time to time, but this isn’t exactly flour, sugar, butter, eggs territory.
Let’s consider that. Cake mixes generally are just a mix of flour, sugar, fat and stabilisers/preservatives/flavourings. All they are doing is turning the fat into a dry ingredient (mmm, dry fat) and boxing it all up. Most require you to add eggs and some sort of liquid (generally water or milk) to get the wet/dry ratio right.
So, I can see the theory, custard is eggs and milk essentially, why wouldn’t it work?
Well, several reasons.
One, as you can see, tinned custard isn’t made with eggs. However, let’s let that slide, it’s still wet, if a little thick (doesn't this all sound delicious) it’s got the vague flavour profile you’re looking for.
Two, adding eggs and beating them in adds something else too. Air. This is crucial to baking, even with raising agents, you need some air in there somehow. It’s why vegan cakes can be hard to make light, because you’ve got to do some heavy (hah) lifting with non-egg based subs. Custard is not a light thing. It will not add air.
Three. Other stuff. Mostly sugar. I note that JM says this makes a very sweet cake. I bet it fucking does. Packet cake mix is super sweet anyway, compared to homemade cake, and 10% of that custard is sugar too. Tell you what it’s missing though – more little bursts of random super sweetness – that must be where the sultanas come in.
So, yes, I daresay this, umm, creation is heavy and dense ‘by nature’, or rather by ‘factory production’, but is it cake? I mean, is it? Nope. It’s a lump of sweet stuff, made with something approaching ingredients that you would find in cake. I reckon the clue is in the fact that it needs to be stone cold before you can handle it. Like it has to set. Cake doesn’t, um, set.
TBH, if you have a sweet, sweet tooth and a taste for that sort of shop produced taste (and sometimes I do, bring me a Mr Kipling fondant fancy and I’ll likely bite your hand off), and aren’t too worried about how heavily something sits in your stomach, it’s probably, broadly speaking, edible.
However, looking at the price of cake mix, and the effort involved, I think I’d rather buy a Jamaican Ginger Cake or Lyles Golden Syrup cake from the ‘convenience store’ and some custard and have a nice time with that. You can get my tips for that special and secret ‘recipe’ and others in my new book ‘Chucking Things Together In A Bowl’, coming out just as soon as I get round to writing it, though not yet, because I’M BUSY.
A joint thread title effort. Your prize: a baggy each of the scrap stock.
