It's my granddaughter's 13th birthday today and although her mum had already bought her a cake I decided to treat her to one of the Big French Fancy Cakes as I'd seen her looking at them in Tesco recently.

We all adore French Fancies and the cake looked big enough to serve all seven of us, there was the choice of yellow or pink so I went for the pink as I think this colour is always the tastiest in the box. When we got it home I took it out of the box and served it straight from the silver card base, which by the way is rather flimsy so be careful how you pick it up!

I must say the cake was a big disappointment. It didn't really taste like a French Fancy at all as the proportions were all wrong. There was too much sponge for a start and the cream used in the dome wasn't the same as I would expect from a normal sized French Fancy. The icing seemed to be normal birthday cake icing, not the more dense icing normally used on the cakes, which was tasty but ultimately too sweet as the cake is so tall and wide that you get a lot of icing per slice.

In the end I stopped looking at it as a French Fancy, it's simply a supermarket bought birthday cake in a French Fancy shape. It made me feel a little cheated if I'm honest, even though the cake itself was actually surprisingly tasty.

The sponge has a lovely delicate vanilla flavour, it's a little drier than I would have liked but is still just on the right side of being a nice consistency. This big cake is not at all moist and airy like the smaller French Fancies which almost melt in your mouth, it's much denser in consistency and certainly is not fluffy as I had been expecting. The cream at the top is more like a synthetic whipped cream and is not buttery like the cream inside a regular sized French Fancy, it's pleasant enough but doesn't really taste or feel anything like the butter cream it's supposed to resemble.

Wrapped in the sweet and stodgy icing, this ends up being a very sickly cake indeed. The cake is supposed to serve twelve but we shared it between four adults and three children so perhaps this is why we all felt so queasy afterwards, although to be honest if you tried to share it between twelve you'd have very thin slices indeed.

It's just all round too sweet for me. It's just a shop bought birthday cake only with even more sugar than usual. I did find it a fairly tasty cake but honestly there are better available at a much cheaper price than the £6.50 I paid.