Baking Peppa Pig cup cakes…

Two of my toddler’s favourite things in life right now are Peppa Pig and cake so when I spotted the Peppa Pig Muddy Puddle Cup Cake mix pack in Tesco a few weeks ago I suspected I might be onto a winner!

I’ll confess now that I’m pretty *coughs shyly* underwhelming when it comes to cooking. I once managed to burn fried eggs! Our family is very well looked after most days by Daddy chef. I lack confidence in the kitchen and as a result my inclination is to steer well clear whenever I can.

But I don’t want to be like that and I certainly don’t want it to rub off on Little Miss. And, when I’m in the right mood, I do secretly enjoy a spot of baking. Everybody loves cake and there’s generally less to go wrong with sweet compared to savoury! Less chance people could get sick if I screw up!

So, keen to give Little Miss her first foray into home baking – and perhaps just a little bit inspired by Great British Bake Off mania – I snapped up the Peppa mix for a bargain £1.69.

The pack does only make 12 cakes, meaning the fruits of our labour were never going to last very long in our house. But the ease of using the mix and time it took were perfect for a toddler and even I found the simple recipe relatively stress-free.

We made the cakes while Little Miss’s baby brother slept and the whole activity took less than an hour – and given that Little Miss wanted to know when she could eat the cake within seconds of me first opening the box, this was important!

All the key ingredients are there for you and ready to go, meaning no fiddling around weighing everything out. You just need to add water and an egg and then you’re ready to unleash your child and a wooden spoon to mix it all together – until they get tired, which invariably they do after about 30 seconds! We then used an electric hand mixer to finish it off.

The mixture is then ready to spoon into the cake cases, which Little Miss loved setting out on the baking tray at the start, before going in the oven.

About 15 minutes later they came out and we left them to cool, amid much protest from my hungry little cooking partner, while we made the muddy puddle chocolate icing – which Little Miss lovingly sneezed into as well as constantly dipping her fingers in and eating while I tried to stir it into the right consistency!

Once ready, you then simply splodge a dollop of icing on each cake. As you can see my dollops varied quite wildly in size!

Muddy puddles in place, you then finish off with one of the Peppa printed sugar decorations on the top – or ‘stickers’ as Little Miss called them.

And voila! You’re done. The cakes are fairly small in size, an ideal portion for little ones but gone in one bite for some greedy adults (who will remain nameless, ‘Daddy Pig’). This adult thought they were pretty darn tasty too!

Overall, I’d say our first little cooking activity was a bonafide success, much to my amazement. Yes, it was a very simple pack mix but it’s given me confidence to try other things in the future and hopefully get Little Miss interested in cooking from an early age.

And finally, of course, Little Miss got to eat her our handiwork. I think her face probably says it all. Yum!