Mr Kipling does NOT make exceedingly good cakes!

[ElenaSt]

I remember seeing this advert circa 1978 and thinking how nice those French Fancies looked, but upon buying a box and taking a bite, it was bloody awful!

Sickly, and synthetic tasting.

Over the years I've tried a few more of his offerings and they have all been a huge disappointment and are either tasteless or synthetically over sweet tasting.

If you've ever eaten real cake then you will never buy Mr kiplings ever again.

We had them growing up so I do like them, apple pies, lemon slices and chocolate slices are my favourites.
Obviously I'm in a minority though.

Since when has regular icing tasted synthetic?! It's just icing! The inside is lovely fluffy cake!

It does make me laugh when people call regular things 'synthetic' just because it's wrapped in plastic 🙄

For example, McDonalds had an offer on cheese bites over Christmas and everyone on their social media was calling it "plastic cheese" "synthetic plastic shite coated in breadcrumbs" - it was pure Camembert coated in breadcrumbs. That's it. 🤣🤣🤣🤣

Ohhh cake !
I do like a French fancy with a cuppa.
I'm actually a cake maker nothing beats fresh warm cake from oven Cadbury chocolate ,red velvet or vanilla....... delicious x

I'm partial to a Country Slice, but they are so sweet that I only get them very occasionally. Usually when the DC have friends coming round so there'll only be one left for me to eat... Otherwise I'll trough the whole pack and then feel sick 😫

The only acceptable products from that ole fucker are the frosty fancies, the all pink fancies or the trifle bakewells. The rest is shit and even I can do better.

Yes Indeed!!

Individual battenbergs are nice with a cup of coffee.

People call them synthetic because of all the highly processed ingredients used to make the cake and icing.

A cake should be flour, butter/veg oil, egg and sugar plus any flavouring like vanilla, fruit etc. 6 ingredients tops. If you look at the ingredients of Mr Kipling there's at least 15-20 ingredients, very few of which you would find in a household kitchen. These ingredients are cheaper than using butter, cane sugar and egg and they also extend the shelf life, but unfortunately they are much worse for your health. The cakes taste nothing like a sponge should taste and definitely taste 'synthetic'.

Saying all that... I probably wouldn't turn down a cherry Bakewell if I was offered 🍒

I worked at the Mr Kiplings factory when I was a teenager, doing a holiday job. It was full of long, mechanised production lines making different cakes. Mr Kipling did not emerge with his pocket watch to announce it was tea time!

We'd spend a few hours making what seemed like the same pies for each of the different supermarkets. The whole place smelled of carbs and there was a shop where you could buy food cheaply. Funnily enough, I never fancied it after spending a day in close proximity to millions of pies.

The room I cannot forget was the apple pie disaster/punishment room, where something had gone wrong in the making and the pies had somehow been squashed into huge mounds. Room 101. You got sent there if you were new, unreasonable or unwilling. It was a room full of angry, uncooperative people. You'd spend the day separating great mounds of squashed apple pies from their metallic cases so they could be sent to some animal to eat, all the time watching the modern clock on the wall desperate to go home.

I haven't been able to eat sugar for years now, and I would give my right arm for a french fancy. All the rest are shite though, especially the apple pies.

YANBU, they are all crap

These were the little beauties!

It's funny that people say that.
My mum makes fantastic tasting cakes. When she baked cakes for school fairs people used to ask us which hers were because they tasted best. She wasn't brilliant at decoration but people that had tasted her cakes wanted them. She even had people asking her if she'd make them another when he cakes had gone.

So we almost never had bought cakes as a child. A treat was 1/2 a donut or 1/5 of a Danish pastry. That probably happened about once a year. People (and my parents) told us how lucky we are.

But, you know what, I love a bought cake. I'd pick a Mr Kipling's cake quite happily. Offer me a piece of mum's cake or a French fancy and it would depend on the day which I'd choose.

Agree but the bakewells with 4mm of fondant icing are excellent after labour. I was offered one with custard last time and a cup of properly caffeinated stand your spoon up tea. Sublime.

Not quite that big but I'm sure I've seen a giant French Fancy celebration cake

I bought one once thinking it would be like a huger FF but the icing wasn't the same , more like a roll-out plasticy covering
Even my DMum wouldn't venture a 2nd slice it was that bad

Oh the Lyons chocolate/orange/lemob cupcakes knocked the spots off The Fabulous Bakin' Boys !

The French equivalent which I grew up with is Bonne Maman - madeleines, filled crêpes, little tartelettes. Yeah, they're not like 'really ones but they're not supposed to be. You can enjoy both!

M&S do good fondant fancies

A sign of age I guess but I cannot eat any of it as my teeth just struggle with a ton of sugar-

I guess that the cakes I bake aren't 'real' in that case 😂

Ooh I do like the Angel cakes though

When My Kipling first came out, it's cakes etc. were decent, even good, quality. That was many years ago, 1967 according to Wikipedia (!). However, I've tried buying them a couple of times in the past couple of years and I was shocked at what sugary artificially flavoured rubbish they have become. They are things to avoid! My most recent purchase, Bakewell Slices, had each pair of slices in a rigid clear plastic tray, covered by a clear cellophane bag. In opening, the tacky sugary topping resolutely adhered to the cellophane, so that the slice lost its topping on the way out of the bag. The slices were really small, sub-cake size I'd say. Once upon a time, their Almond Slices were a treat. No longer. They have devised a way of extruding them like toothpaste, and putting a miserly few cut almonds on top. It doesn't even look like an almond slice, 1/10!

The brand has become a victim of repeated cost cutting, with people with Food Science degrees being told to endlessly shave costs until the product bears no relation to the food item as the world knows (or knew) it.
My suggestion, find a shop that makes their own cakes and patronise them.

"My suggestion, find a shop that makes their own cakes and patronise them"

'Oh, you've done such a good job with this bread. It's almost like you know what you are doing'

'Gosh, you really did your best to try and make these cakes look pretty, didn't you?'.

Is that the kind of thing you mean? 😁