I’ve had some fun this afternoon making retro fairy cakes using a gluten free Vanilla Sponge Mix from Sheffield company Delicious Alchemy, who have very kindly sent me a few samples to try. I’m hoping there will be a few left to share at my little boy’s friend’s birthday picnic on Monday…

I started with this mix, which can be used to make 2 regular 20cm sponges for a birthday or Victoria sponge cake. But I fancied making some old fashioned buns, and I ended up making an assortment of little fairy cakes and a few bigger blueberry muffins. They were nice and quick to make, although I did then spend a while playing around with the different toppings.

The packet instructions are simple. You mix the contents with 3 large eggs, 180g soft unsalted butter and 20ml water. The instructions say you only need to whisk the ingredients for a total of 25 seconds with an electric whisk, but I had to whisk it for a fair bit longer to get a smooth consistency. This might have been because my butter wasn’t quite soft enough, or because my electric whisk isn’t particularly powerful, but nevertheless, it produced a nice cake mixture:

I 3/4 filled a few fairy cake cases with some of the mixture as it was. I then added a few leftover blueberries into some of the mix to make some bigger muffin-size buns. Into the remaining mix, I put a little raw cacao (not too much as I didn’t want to change the consistency) and some chopped up chocolate, and put this into some more fairy cakes cases.

The fairy cakes took about 18 minutes at 180C in my fan oven (they were rather full up) and produced really nicely risen little buns. The larger blueberry ‘muffins’ took a few minutes more to get a golden top

I decorated most of the buns with icing and sprinkles, and made a butter cream topping by mixing butter and icing sugar for the butterfly buns. But my favourite has to be this one with the cherry on top. Perfect.

I’ve just sampled one of the blueberry ‘muffins’. The sponge is really nice and light inside, and you can definitely taste the vanilla. The golden top gives a lovely, sweet crunch, and you really wouldn’t know these were gluten free. Packet mixes like these are particularly useful if you’re coeliac because they save you having to faff about with various different flours to get a nice texture – Delicious Alchemy have already done the hard work in that respect.

If you’re watching your sugar like me, these would have to be a rare treat, and I won’t be able to eat the ones with icing on. There are probably about 16g sugar in each of the buns excluding icing and sprinkles – yikes! But I really enjoyed making these cute buns and I’m sure my boys and hubby will help with making sure I don’t get the opportunity to scoff too many!

I’m not sure what the etiquette is in this situation, but I should probably declare that Delicious Alchemy kindly sent me a few products to try out after my recent blog about them, however I have not been paid to review the products.