Faking your Baking - WRONG.

One of the blogs I follow regularly, and generally love the content of, posted a blog this morning that made me spit my muesli back into the bowl in abject frustration and disbelief. 

A photograph of some delicious looking little biscuits was published along with the promotion: Best biscuits you'll ever make - only three ingredients!

Wow. Sounds too good to be true, right? Well, it is. Those three ingredients? 

Packet cake mix (specifically, the cheapest you can find...)

Canola Oil 

Egg

Flavouring of your choice (Lots of people have added their two cents worth here with what they generally add - anything from jam to nutella to goodness knows what else.)

Look. I hate to nitpick here, but that is not three ingredients. It's a gazillion. Here's what's in your average packet cake mix: 

Wheat flour, sugar, vegetable fats and oils, emulsifiers (soy lecithin, 471, 477f), antioxidant (320), raising agents (500, 450), dextrose, starch, emulsifiers (471, 475), salt, flavour, vegetable gum, colour. 

So this 'fabulous' and 'easy' cookie recipe has a host of numbers and swagger of undoubtedly hydrogenated vegetable oils (designed to extend the shelf life in commercially produced cookies they are carcinogenic and have untold detrimental health impacts, and have no place in home baking)... Which makes me think the best thing about the recipe at all is, in fact, the egg. 

 

Here's what I particularly loathe about articles along these lines. It's all a conspiracy. A big fat lie designed to make you think that simple baking is impossible to do without 'short cuts' like this. Or that something like this will taste better than a more traditional recipe. What a crock! 

Do you know what I put in my cookies?  (Spelt) Flour, (Rapadura) sugar and a good quality butter - plus a little water or milk to bring the dough together. I might add some vanilla pods, or some chocolate chips, but essentially that's it. Four natural ingredients and yep, they taste bloody good. Anything that comes in a PACKET and markets itself as an 'easy' alternative to the homestyle original is bound to include a shedload of nasties that your body is better not to know about. Especially when it comes to baking for kids.