Wandering round Aldi the other day I spotted a brown box in the cake section that I'd not noticed before. Looking at the box I remembered I'd read favourable reviews of these Toffee Bakewells on here and decided to take a box home for after tea.
Cutting a long story short, they didn't make it until teatime. The kids came home from school starving so we dug into the cakes.
The first thing I noticed was the delicious smell of toffee. These small cakes have a smell that is predominently toffee with a sweet underlying smell of fudge. Good enough to eat, in fact! It's not an 'in your face' overwhelming smell, but this cake has been sitting in front of me for about 5 minutes and I keep getting the scrummy smell wafting towards me. I'm now hoping against hope that this cake is going to taste even half as good as it smells.
The cakes themselves look just like a traditional Cherry Bakewell, apart from the colour. You've got the familiar pastry case holding the whole thing together but instead of white icing with a cherry on top, you're faced with a beige vaguely toffee coloured icing and small cubes of fudge where the cherry should be.
So, it smells good and looks good. But a lot of Aldi food smells and looks good but tastes revolting, will these cakes pass the taste test? On looks alone, the pastry looks too thick although I can only go on the crinkled pastry around the top edge because obviously until I've bitten into the cake I can't ascertain how thick the pastry cup is. The pastry also has a pale, undercooked look.
OK, OK, the taste test. Biting into the cake tells me yes, the pastry is too thick. My first bite consisted mainly of pastry which in my opinion is too much pastry. It's very good quality, nice and crumbly but firm enough to get a good mouthful without the need of vacuuming the keyboard tomorrow. The pastry isn't very sweet which isn't too nice when eaten on it's own, but the second bite reveals why the sweetness isn't there.
You see, the second bite takes me into cake territory. The toffee icing is delicious, a mixture of toffee and fudge flavours with the same thick consistency of the icing on a Cherry Bakewell. It's very sweet, almost too sugary for my teeth to cope with and the more you chew the more the toffee flavour takes over. It's like a fudge texture with a toffee flavour. Gorgeous. The fudge pieces which sit atop the cake are very sugary sweet and it's a good thing there are only three or four small cubes because otherwise they'd make the cake far more sweet than it already is.
Underneath the icing is a thin sponge cake. When I say thin, I mean it's roughly the same thickness as the icing. It's a sweet toffee flavoured sponge, more of a biscuit texture because it's quite hard and crumbly. It's just the right side of soft to be called cake. It tastes nice enough, although this part of the cake is fairly bland in flavour and masked by the overwhelming taste of the icing. Picking a tiny piece of cake away from the rest of the cake I find it doesn't really taste of much at all, it's vaguely toffee flavour and I'm sure I can detect some vanilla flavouring in there too.
I'm supposed to be on a diet. And I've just eaten four of these, the kids have had one each and I've finished the box. Now for the scary bit. Each of these small cakes will 'cost' you 203 cals and 3.3g fat, which means I've more or less expended my calorie allowance for the day by eating four of the things. Me? A pig? Yes, I think so too.
I'll definitely be buying these Toffee Bakewells again, in fact I prefer them to the traditional Mr Kipling cakes and at 69p for a box of six you can't really go wrong. I'll just make sure I buy them when the kids have friends round so I can't binge on them again!
More details
Smell
Very nice
Evaluate this review
How helpful would this review be to someone making a buying decision? Rating guidelines
