I love to bake, although I don’t do it that often otherwise me and the hubby would just spend all our time eating cake! I always used to stick to a few favourites but since I started going to my local baking club I like to try out new recipes. And with a meeting of baking club coming up I was on the look out for something new to bake. So when I saw a tweet from Sugar and Crumbs looking for people to try out their new flavours of icing sugar I jumped at the chance!

The Details

Sugar and Crumbs is a UK company selling flavoured icing sugar and cocoa powder. I had never heard of flavoured icing sugar before I heard of Sugar and Crumbs so I was eager to give it a go. There are 22 different flavours of icing sugar – everything from strawberry milkshake to chilli lime! I was sent two new flavours, coffee and salted caramel, to try along with some black cherry icing sugar. Sugar and Crumbs also sell five different flavoured cocoa powders too and I was sent the chocolate cherry flavour. I haven’t had chance to try the cherry flavours yet to I will write another post about those when I have given them a go. In addition to the icing sugars and cocoa powders, Sugar and Crumbs also sell a range of coloured sugar paste and cake decorations.

So what did I make?

First of all I made a coffee sponge with coffee flavour buttercream. I was going into work for two days last week so I thought I would take in a cake for my hard-working colleagues. I used a very simple method to make the sponge – just weigh two eggs and then use the same weight of butter, castor sugar and self-raising flour. To add a coffee flavour I mixed two tablespoons of instant coffee with the same amount of boiling water, allowed it to cool then added it to the cake batter after it was all mixed. For the buttercream I used 125g butter with the 125g sample pack of coffee icing sugar I was sent and 125g of plain icing sugar. I added a little milk to get the right consistency and I also added a little dribble of coffee left from the cake, more to give the buttercream a bit of a coffee colour than for flavour.

The second cake I made was the one for baking club. This was a Devil’s Food Cake with Salted Caramel flavour buttercream. The recipe for the cake came from the first Great British Bake Off cookery book. It is basically a very chocolatey cake which also has soured cream added. It was a much more complicated recipe than I would usually use but I was pleased with how it came out. And luckily, Toby was happy to sit and play in his highchair and eat some lunch while I made a mess in the kitchen! The cake is baked as two cakes then each is sliced in half to make four layers. In between each layer there is a chocolate ganache made with melted chocolate and more soured cream. The recipe in the book also has this ganache on top the cake too but I decided to use the salted caramel buttercream instead. For this cake I used 100g butter with the 125g of salted caramel icing sugar, 75g of plain icing sugar and a little bit of milk.

The Pros 

• The flavoured icing sugars were very easy to use. Just like using plain icing sugar in fact!
• Both the coffee and salted caramel flavours were nice and strong. This means you can mix part flavoured icing sugar with part plain to get the flavour you need. This also reduces the cost as the flavoured icing sugar is more expensive than plain.
• Everyone who tried my cakes really liked the flavoured buttercream, especially the salted caramel flavour (which someone commented tasted a bit like Butterscotch Angel Delight!)
• Some of the flavours available are really unusual (Banana Split, Galia Melon, Pear Drops and Peach Melba to name a few) – I’m not sure how you would easily add these flavours to icing yourself so being able to buy them ready made is great!
• The products are well packaged in easy open, resealable packets.

The Cons

• I would say the only real downside to the Sugar and Crumbs products is the price. The icing sugar is £4.99 for 500g, compared to £1 for the same amount of plain icing sugar.
• I would perhaps like the icing sugar to be coloured to reflect the flavour. When I made the coffee buttercream I ended up adding a little bit of coffee just to get the coffee colour – but then this rather defeated the purpose of the flavour already being in the icing sugar!

The Verdict

Due to the price of Sugar and Crumbs icing sugar I probably wouldn’t use it for my everyday baking. Also, I probably wouldn’t buy any of the flavours which are fairly easy to create yourself using plain icing sugar (for example; lemon drizzle, coffee or vanilla). However, for a special bake I would be very tempted by some of the more unusual flavours on offer especially as the cost can be lessened by using a mix of flavoured and plain icing sugars.

**Disclaimer: I was sent samples of flavoured icing sugar and cocoa powder from Sugar and Crumbs in return for this review. All opinions are my own.