I tend to keep a simple cake or biscuit kit in the cupboard for an emergency quick confidence-boosting cooking session for the kids. It's a useful thing, particularly for our youngest (aged 9), who really enjoys making things. She has a short attention span, and tends to be easily discouraged if things don't work straight away. This kit for choc chunk muffins is almost too quick to make! Literally all that it involves is tipping the bag of dry mixture into a bowl, then adding an egg and some water. Stir it all in thoroughly, share it out between the 6 muffin cake-cases that are included in the box, and there you are. We don't have a muffin tin, so we placed them carefully on a baking tray, which worked fine. Needless to say, she was able to carry out the whole operation, even putting them into the oven herself. Unfortunately I was the one who got to enjoy washing the dishes afterwards... I was also deputed to rescue the muffins from the oven though, which made up for that! They looked really good, and smelled very good too, as they had done while they were baking.

I've read a few reviews of this product, most of which are very positive. Maybe we're hard to please, but unfortunately when it came to eating them, we found that one or two things let them down - to start with, they were very well attached to their cake cases, and about a fifth of each cake was left behind when removed to be eaten. They were pretty much perfectly cooked, so this wasn't due to them being burnt on! It could have been due to there not being any fat to add during the making process, so I can't complain about that, as several of their kits ask you to add vegetable oil. At least it kept the added fat content, and therefore the calories, down a bit. However the most disappointing thing was the flavour, especially bearing in mind that there were quite a number of chocolate chip chunks that went in - the only really visible ones after baking were the white ones (not surprising perhaps as the muffins are a lovely brown chocolatey colour), but the milk and dark chocolate chunks seemed to have completely melted into the muffins, and the flavour itself was nowhere near as rich as we had hoped, in fact it was disappointingly bland. After being so pleased about the ease and great appearance of them, even our daughter couldn't hide her disappointment at the lack of flavour. This was the first time that we'd used this kit, and I'm afraid that due to the taste won't be getting this one again. However, since the chocolate swirl cake that I reviewed a while ago was so nice, I've already got another one of their kits in the cupboard - we're trying their cookies out next time :)

Ingredients & nutritional info:

Sugar, Wheat Flour, Vegetable Oil, Chocolate Chips (9%) (Sugar, Cocoa Mass, Cocoa Butter, Emulsifier: Soya Lecithin, Natural Flavouring: Vanilla), White Chocolate Chunks (9%) (Sugar, Whole Milk Powder, Cocoa Butter, Skimmed Milk Powder, Emulsifier: Soya Lecithin, Natural Flavouring: Vanilla), Cocoa (Processed with Alkali), Raising Agents: Sodium Bicarbonate, Sodium Aluminium Phosphate, Dicalcium Phosphate, Dried Egg White, Modified Starch (Tapioca and Corn Starch), Corn Starch, Dextrose, Flavourings, Salt, Emulsifier: Mono- and Diglycerides of Fatty Acids, Stabiliser: Xanthan Gum,

Contains Wheat, Soya, Egg and Milk Ingredients

The cooking ingredients and simple instructions are mainly in English, and unusually also in many of the Nordic languages.

Currently £2.19 at Tesco.