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emily-clark
17th November 2012

Get lost, Get Baked

This student baking venture needs to up its game
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TLDR

Get Baked is a newly-conceived business selling cakes, pies, brownies and American sweets to a student market. The concept is a good one – delivery of desserts to your front door. Their Facebook footfall is large; this is probably due to their regular posts depicting their freshly baked goods and also because of the association with smoking weed. Inspired.

I ordered a selection of their offerings: Caramel Apple Pie, Chocolate Lumpy Bumpy, Banoffee Gateau, Malteser Brownie and Marshmallow Blondie, with a side of milk chocolate sauce (I was sharing). The delivery was prompt and would have felt even faster in the land of the high and drunk.

I’ll start with the Caramel Apple Pie at £2.75– the filling tasted very artificial with cubes of apple in a processed type apple sauce. The pastry was fine but the caramel was fairly flavourless. The whole pie generally had an unloved air. Had I only ordered this, I would have been very disappointed. It just didn’t seem homemade. Hopes dashed, I moved onto the Banoffee Gateau, at £2.00.

Firstly, what’s wrong with Banoffee Pie? Sounds much nicer to me; gâteau just implies pretentious cake. But never mind, what was primarily wrong with this cake was the lack of both its eponymous heroes. Banana was entirely boycotting every element of the dessert, although my housemate did say that he caught a fleeting essence of it in the filling. The toffee manifested in a few tiny (grated?!) pieces, sprinkled forlornly on top of the cream that had started to congeal a bit and do that funny off-colour thing. The cream also had a strong taste of lime – an unwelcome visitor having expected banana. The sponge, however, was beautifully light and moist – but this was too little too late.

Finally, success arrived with the £3 Chocolate Lumpy Bumpy Cheesecake. The chocolate ganache layer on top was thin and dark, shrouding a cloud of thick cheesecake filling. Underneath were the layers of chocolate mousse a chocolate sponge that was again beautifully light. This one was more expensive than the other two, maybe because they knew it was actually good – but why not just standardise the prices at £2.50 rather than having each pie or gâteau at a slightly different price.

The Malteser brownie was another disappointment, and had a strong acrid taste, like cigarette ash or burnt coffee. I think maybe it had burnt slightly on the bottom. My housemates didn’t notice this as much as I did but even if I’m exaggerating its bitter taste, the brownie still wouldn’t have passed in my book. It needed more chocolate and less sugar. It needed to be taller in height to have enough thickness to be gooey and moist. The Malteser element was undetectable; I was imagining them embedded in the top. When in doubt, use the Ben & Jerry technique – if you’re going to have chunks of something throughout, make them big and obvious. If they’re unfeasible to bake with, they should have used a different ingredient.

The Marshmallow Blondie was better, you could actually see the half-melted marshmallows sunk in the top. Good start, but the thickness of the blondie again needed to be more and again it had too much sugar. The texture was also fairly raw. I’m all for a squidgy brownie, but this one simply needed longer in the oven.

The chocolate sauce I had ordered wasn’t actually available, so they gave me a toffee sauce and a Nutella sauce instead. The toffee sauce was thin and artificial. The Nutella was Nutella, and I am sceptical as to whether or not the resale of Nutella is even legal. I thought that the amount of sauce supplied with all the cakes was not enough – the ideal Caramel Apple Pie would surely have caramel dribbled liberally and temptingly so that it spills over the sides.

Despite the initially professional-looking graphics and branding on the website, the packaging was very amateurish. The cakes came in blank burger boxes and the brownies were wrapped in foil. The sauces came in a paper bag and had been messily decanted into the containers and also were leaking into the bag. A comparison which sprang to mind were the Graze boxes, another student set-up company which really sets the example for professional packaging that mirrors the ethics of the company.

I have a few other niggles with the website. The Chocolate Fudge Cake, described “it’s gotta’ [sic] be on the menu was ironically not in stock. Many other things have also not been in stock when I have otherwise visited the website. The floating selection boxes on the website didn’t align properly with the items so I mistakenly selected certain things, even though I was sober. Many brands were misspelt, such as Nutella “Nuttella” or Malteser “Malteaser.”

Despite wanting to support small businesses and student ventures, despite wishing I had come up with the concept myself, despite loving all things to do with baking and eating, Get Baked does not win my seal of approval. Get lost – or maybe just get better.

 


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