Is it really baking?

I think I may be a baking snob...I haven't posted on this blog for ages but this advert in today's paper inspired me and it wasn't in a good way!

It's an advert for a Delia Christmas cake in a packet where all of the ingredients are measured out for you and you just have to combine them and cook it, which to me that is just wrong on so many levels...

Firstly it's rather cheating - I mean part of the skill of making a cake is getting the measurements correct. I guess you could argue that it's convenient if you don't usually bake cakes and don't want to specially buy lots of fancy ingredients. But if I'm honest, are cake ingredients really that fancy? I mean surely things like flour, sugar, butter and eggs are a standard store-cupboard ingredient? True you may not already have dried fruit but a Christmas cake uses a lot of it anyway and the leftovers can always be used to make more cakes or as a healthy snack. As for the spices, yes you only use a little bit in the cake but again they keep for ages and can be used to add a bit of zing to a crumble topping or in more cakes. So I reckon that claiming you don't want to waste ingredients is a somewhat lame excuse for being too lazy to measure it out yourself.

There's also the argument that it would be quicker, but I assume all the bits are individually packaged so by the time you've opened all of those you could probably have measured everything yourself anyway. The real time-saver would be a pre-lined cake tin to bake it in! And of course there is all the additional packaging that this must entail...

Finally the price - the pack costs a tenner and although I'm very anti- buying ready-made cakes, to be honest for that amount of money I'd want a finished cake not a bake-your-own job. Plus I wonder whether the pack includes all the perishable ingredients like eggs and butter, and what about the marizpan and icing, are they included or is there another pack for that?

Yes, whilst the advert is all glossy and sounds good, I think I will be sticking the more traditional method of bake-your-own cakes, although this year we're having Christmas at my parents and my godmother is bringing the cake so there'll be no cake-baking at all for me.