The Caker - A Review

The Caker is a New Zealand owned business, which started when 21-year-old Jordan Rondel started a small blog in order to sell a few cakes in Auckland. Now, 12 years later, The Caker has another bakery in Los Angeles, and an impressive reputation, with celebrities such as Pamela Anderson and Chrissy Teigen being fans of the products.

Jordan took her passion for baking from her French grandparents, who also happen to be amazing chefs. She enjoyed baking all throughout her young life, and when studying a bachelor of commerce at university, her dad told her that she should do something with her talent in baking. So, she started her blog sharing recipes in 2010, and soon enough people started enquiring.

She was then tasked with baking multiple cakes, all in her mum’s kitchen. That was when Jordan went commercial, and The Caker was born. Now, she has two bakeries (one in Auckland and one in Los Angeles) which sell fresh cakes, as well as multiple recipe books, baking classes and cake kits.

Recently, Jordan was asked to be a judge on the Great Kiwi Bake Off, and after seeing her appearance, I decided it was time I gave one of her ‘cake kits’ a go.

There are 6 different cake kit flavours on the website available now, and I chose the Banana Cinnamon Flavour. The cake kit comes in a very aesthetic box, and contains an instruction card, two ingredient bags (one for cake and one for topping) and a sheet of baking paper (in order to achieve The Caker’s famous ripple edges.

All of the ingredients in the ingredient mixes are ‘real’, making these cake kits stand out compared to our usual supermarket-bought ones such as Edmonds and Betty Crocker. The Caker uses unbleached flour, coconut sugar, almonds and other nuts, as well as baking powder, baking soda and salt. The Caker also doesn’t believe in using things like artificial flavourings and food colouring. Other brands use ingredients that could be considered ‘less natural’, as well as artificial colours and flavours and the habitat destructor, palm oil. However, real ingredients come at a price, with this single The Caker cake kit being $30 + shipping, rather than a traditional Edmonds chocolate cake mix at $6.20.

Baking this cake was also very straightforward, just like baking any other cake mix. So, as a lazy baker I appreciated that all I needed to do was add mashed bananas and some butter, then pour the mixture into a tin and chuck it in the oven. However, after an hour of being in the oven, the cake almost seemed undercooked in the middle. However, this is actually the way that the cakes are supposed to turn out, because the recipes use almond flour, meaning that they will be much more moist than the usual cakes produced from a box mix.

“These kits do not make airy sponges, they make luscious, decadent cakes, which satisfy even the most intense cake cravings.” - Jordan Rondel.

I found after trying this borderline undercooked cake that it was actually delicious. It was a very spiced banana cake, so the cinnamon definitely did not get lost throughout the baking process. I will not be refraining from ordering any more of these cake kits in the future, and I certainly recommend them to everyone.