Here at leedsfoodie.co.uk, we love baking but with our little lady now very much a toddler who doesn’t want to sit and watch us bake we don’t get to do as much of it as we would like any more. Fortunately, our little one was celebrating her second birthday recently, which meant that we had the opportunity to create a cake for her to help enhance the celebrations and make her special day even more amazing!

As we were baking for her birthday we worked as a team (and used her naps!) to help create her cake and as spiders are the ‘in’ thing with her at the moment, there was no choice but to try and create a spider cake!

With fondant icing cheap to buy and time consuming to make, we cheated and bought pre-made (and coloured) fondant icing. However, we couldn’t cheat with the cake itself so we decided to make use of our new Judge twin blade mixer (that can be used as a stand mixer).

While we would have loved to have created a ‘complicated’ sponge mix for the cake, time constraints meant that we went for the all in one method (thanks Delia!) and the mixer was a delight to use, ensuring that we were able to get our cake perfectly mixed and ready to bake in the oven. The mixer was able to go at a range of different speeds and offered hands free mixing, which was great as it meant we could get the rest of our preparations sorted for the spider cake exterior. After we realised we hadn’t made enough mixture for the two parts of the sponge, we were able to get back on schedule very quickly with the mixer helping us out while we got the first batch in the cake tin.

The mixing bowl is easy to detach from the stand and most importantly easy to clean (as are the mixing beaters), so it was really easy to then quickly make the buttercream for the filling of our spider cake.

We have other stand mixers and there are more professional mixers on the market, but the Judge one (which also comes with dough hooks) is excellent value at £55 and is easy to clean and use, it is perfect for people who don’t have the time to mess around with equipment that is complicated and annoyingly hard to clean.