Celebrating 25 years of HARIBO Starmix

25 years ago, HARIBO brought together its most well loved assortment of sweets to create the brand’s first ever mixed bag – HARIBO Starmix and it’s no surprise that they eventually went on to become Britain’s favourite sweet. With the delicious combination of the cola bottle, egg, ring, heart and bear, everyone in our house has their favourite and, loving them as much as we do, it was only right that we baked them our very own birthday cake to celebrate!

I’ll be honest, baking with the kids is always a lovely idea in theory and yet when it come down to it, it never quite goes to plan. I always have big ideas when it comes to birthday cakes spending hours on Pinterest, watching videos on YouTube, and convincing myself that my baking talents are far more capable than they really are. We’ve had a series of disasters over the years: the birthday I burned 72 cupcakes one batch after another, the one that was littered with eggshell, and the one where in the end I bought a ready made cake and convinced everyone I had baked it myself (if you’re reading this, I’m sorry I lied..).

So this time, I handed over the reins to the kids and bar the smallest assistance, they did the entire thing themselves….

Ingredients

• 300g Self Raising Flour
• 300g Butter
• 300g Caster Sugar
• 1½ tsp Baking Powder
• 6 Eggs, beaten
• 3 tbsp Milk
• Food Colouring (Orange, yellow, green, red)
• Pre-made butter cream filling

For the icing:

• Pre-made vanilla icing
• 3 x bags of HARIBO Starmix

Method

• Pre-heat oven to 180°C/350°F/Gas 4. Grease four 7″ sandwich tins or line with greaseproof paper.
• In a large bowl, beat all the cake ingredients together, except for the food colourings, to form a smooth soft batter.
• Divide the mixture evenly among four bowls. Stir a few drops of food colouring into each bowl to create all four layers before spreading into the baking tins.
• Bake the tins for about 20-25 minutes until golden brown and the cake springs back when pressed.
• Turn onto a wire tray or cooling rack and allow to cool completely.

Once the cakes had cooled we were ready for the children’s favourite part – decorating it! This is usually the part where I try to cover our botched attempts at baking with copious amounts of icing and hope nobody notices but actually, by some miracle, the cakes all turned out quite well!

Using the buttercream filling we spread a layer between each coloured sponge and layered them together to build the cake. Obviously you can make your own buttercream filling but when it comes to baking with kids I am all about making it as easy as possible and the pre-made fillings are really tasty!

We did find that the children’s spreading technique was a little vigorous at times to say the least and with our sponge being quite soft, we came dangerously close to a cake disaster. Luckily with a cake like this you can easily patch up any broken bits with the buttercream and by the time we were done I think all four of us were surprised by just how well it had turned out!

The next step is super easy,  we just warmed our pre-made vanilla icing in the microwave for twenty seconds so it was of a softer consistency and literally just poured the whole tub onto the top of the cake! We’ve never tried this method before but it was so much easier than trying to ice the cake ourselves and we will definitely do the same going forward.

With the icing on it was time to get creative and first up was hundreds and thousands – a staple for any birthday cake in our house! With our cake being made to celebrate HARIBO Starmix there was only one option for the theme of our cake and the kids couldn’t wait to tear open the sweets and start decorating their cake (and of course eating some in the process!).

As they decorated it was funny to listen to them debate the best HARIBO Starmix with Harry insistent that it had to be the cola bottle, Megan the egg and Eva the heart. Turns out they are all wrong because surely we all know that it’s got to be the rings, right?

Our cake may not win any bake off awards any time soon but seeing how proud the children were of their cake made me realise it’s not all about the perfect cake, but about the fun we had making it, and they really did enjoy every minute of baking their cake!

With the cake finished it was time for the big reveal and I think as far as cakes go, when you’re six, seven and eight, a rainbow cake covered in HARIBO Starmix is pretty much the dream. “Do you think they’ll like it?” Megan asked, and I realised she thought we had to send the cake to HARIBO themselves to enjoy. The look on their faces when I said that we could eat it ourselves was priceless!

The children absolutely loved baking their cake and, albeit surprisingly, it tasted delicious! I think we excelled ourselves this time and all with minimal mess which is a real bonus! Happy 25th Birthday HARIBO Starmix! Congratulations and here’s to another 25 wonderful years!!

#HappyBirthdayStarmix

** This is a collaborative post with HARIBO Starmix. We were compensated for our time. **