Tesco Free From Farmhouse Fruit Cake – Gluten Free

Disappointingly crumblyI have to apologize for the quality of the photograph. I opened the packet last night, and it wasn’t the best light for taking pics. I’ve brightened it up a bit, but it’s still not as good as I would have liked.

Tesco Free From Farmhouse Fruit Cake comes in quite a small packet, without excessive packaging. Just an open top cardboard box wrapped in cellophane, and the cake is in a sort of biggish cupcake-style case (only rectangular). It looks appetizing, with a sugar crusted top.

When you open the packet, you need to use the sharpest knife you can find to slice the cake, and even then it’s difficult to get a whole slice, as the cake is very crumbly. This is not a one-off. I’ve had this cake before, and it’s always like that.

Taste-wise, the cake is quite similar to Mr Kipling’s Country Slices, though not as moist and a lot more prone to fall apart. It’s definitely not the sort of cake you can eat without a plate. Even if you have managed to cut a slice, it tends to break up when you try to take a bite as well, so you end up with a plate full of varying sizes of cake crumbs.

Before I tried the Dutch Apple Cake made by Mrs Crimble, I assumed that all decent gluten free cakes would suffer from the tendency to disintegrate which is exhibited by this cake. Obviously, I don’t think that any more, though I am not sure what the secret is. The Tesco cake seems to hold together best around the fruit, so perhaps it is because Mrs Crimbles cake is made with lots of apple puree (as there’s no other obvious apple presence) that holds it together. Or perhaps Tesco’s cake could do with more xanthan gum (which is listed in the ingredients, though it doesn’t seem to be performing its function of replacing gluten particularly well).

I am not unhappy about eating crumbs, though it’s more difficult. But I couldn’t serve this to guests, for sure. I think, though, that this cake would make a good base for a traditional trifle. Sure, it has fruit in it, which is not normal for the sponge at the bottom of a trifle, but as trifle contains lots of fruit anyway, I think it would work fine.

Here’s the information on the label:
Sponge cake with sultanas topped with demerara sugar. Made with rice flour, potato starch and maize starch.
Free from – Milk, wheat, gluten.
Allergy advice – Contains egg. Recipe: No nuts. Ingredients: Cannot guarantee nut free. Factory: Before being prepared for manufacture of this product, the equipment was previously used to make products containing nuts. Suitable for vegetarians.
Ingredients: Sultanas (25%), Sugar, Sunflower Oil, Rice Flour, Water, Potato Starch, Humectant (Vegetable Glycerine), Dried Egg, Demerara Sugar, Maize Starch, Raising Agents (Disodium diphosphate, Sodium bicarbonate), Salt, Stabiliser (Xanthan Gum), Emulsifiers (Polyglycerol Esters of Fatty Acids, Mono- and Di-Glycerides of Fatty Acids), Preservative (Potassium sorbate), Flavouring.
Nutrition: 100g contains (typical composition): Energy 1620kJ/3900kcal Protein 3.1g; Carbohydrate 56.8g (of which sugars 21.6g); Fat 16.2g (of which polyunsaturates 9.1g); Fibre 1.0g; Sodium 0.3g; Salt 0.77g. Each slice contains the equivalent of 0.2g of salt. For guideline amounts, please visit www.tesco.com

I can’t find any weight specified on the packet. Once I’ve finished the cake, I will check more thoroughly, but in the meantime, I can tell you that the carton measures 5″x3″ or 12.5x9cm (the cake is very slightly smaller than this, due to the inner wrapper), and the cake is just under 2.5″ (6.25cm) high. It’s priced at £1.50 – which I would have reckoned a bargain before I found the Dutch Apple Cake previously reviewed.


Date: August 26th, 2009 | Comments: 4 Comments »

Category: Product reviews

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Prewetts No Wheat Jammy Wheels and Tesco Free From Shortbread

Not RecommendedI haven’t written for a while, not having bought anything new for some time. However, I was in Tesco the other day, and took the opportunity to photograph a couple of products I’ve tried in the past – but I have no wish to buy them again.

Like me, you probably miss some favorites. In my case shortbread and Jammy Dodgers (in themselves a poor substitute for Crawfords Honey Creams, which are no longer available) are top of the list! So I was sucked in, I admit it, one day and bought a packet of Prewetts No Wheat Jammy Wheels and another of Tesco’s own brand Free From Shortbread from the free from shelf in my local store. And when I got them home, I wasted no time in tearing open the packet and making a cup of coffee to go with them.

As you can no doubt tell, I was disappointed. Both products were edible – barely – but both missed the mark in a big way.

Starting with the jammy wheels, the first disappointment was the fact that 90% of them were in little pieces. I know that it’s difficult to get gluten free products to stay together, but I still think a better stab could have been made of it. This, however, wasn’t the worst of it.

The biscuits having fallen apart in a big way, revealed a small button of “jam” in the center, which didn’t even attempt to fill the central part of the sandwich. The actual biscuit part had a very strange taste which was strongly flavored with bicarbonate of soda. Quite unpleasant.

I didn’t throw the rest of the pack away, though I was strongly tempted to do so, because I try not to throw food out if I can avoid it. They were priced at £1.49 for a 200g pack, which would have been quite good for a gluten free product if the biscuits themselves were nice.

I then opened the shortbread. I love shortbread – that crumbly buttery and not overly sweet biscuit which is just wonderful dipped in coffee or just eaten au naturel. I’ve often found (before I was gluten free) that even cheap shortbread is still very tasty, and it has always been one of my favorite treats.

It seems to me that shortbread shouldn’t be that hard to make with gluten free flours, but whether it is or not, the baker responsible for creating the Tesco Free From shortbread recipe didn’t even get close.

At least when you open the pack the contents are intact. The biscuits inside are a bit anemic looking, but that’s ok – there’s no need for shortbread to look particularly golden and inviting, so long as it tastes good. Unfortunately, it fails the test.

I took a bite, ready for the typical buttery crumbliness, and got a mouthful of dry, floury and faintly oaty but otherwise tasteless stuff. Nothing like shortbread at all. This was sad, but I thought it might be better if dipped in my coffee – which would surely get rid of that floury texture which sticks to the tongue so much – unfortunately, this had no real effect except to make the biscuit wet, even if dipped long enough to run the risk of losing part of it.

Again, I was reluctant to throw these away, and I managed to finish the packet over a period of 2 weeks, though it was much like a daily penance. The price for these was £1.25 for a 200g pack.

I won’t be buying either of these again.


Date: August 20th, 2009 | Comments: 2 Comments »

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Mrs Crimbles Corn Cakes – Wheat, Gluten and Dairy Free

Mrs Crimbles corn cakes come in individually wrapped portions
Contents of one portion pack

Unlike all other Mrs Crimbles products I’ve tried, I’m less than enthusiastic about (her/their?) corn cakes. This is not because they are nasty, because they are not. It’s just that there is another similar product which I prefer.

As you can see from the photograph, the corn cakes come in a cardboard outer box, and inside there are four separate portion packs. There are five corn cakes in each pack, which I find a little too much to eat at one go, but as they are sure to go soft if not eaten, I generally do. The whole pack is currently priced at £1.25 at Tesco.

These corn cakes are extremely delicate, and are often already broken when you open the inner packaging. This isn’t as bad as it sounds, because the bits are quite like a snack product, so you just nibble the smaller pieces like crisps.

Because they are so fragile, it’s quite difficult to spread anything on them, like butter or cream cheese, without breaking them. So my advice if you are buying them is to always soften the butter first in winter, or if you are one of those people who keeps it in the fridge, by zapping it in the microwave for a few seconds. If you don’t you will end up with a lot of little bits.

So far as flavor goes, these are fine. They are about as tasty as the average crispbread – that is, not very tasty. They are nice enough to eat with just butter, though I generally have them with cream cheese and smoked salmon.

The product I prefer is becoming more difficult to get. They are Corn Thins by Real Foods Pty, which are round and do not come packed in individual portions, but they keep well enough in an airtight container. They also have less of a tendency to fall apart and are not full of little dents that make a thin coating of butter/whatever difficult. Better if you’re watching your weight, I feel. Unfortunately, although I used to be able to get these in Tesco, Sainsbury and some Morrisons, none of the local branches of these stores carries them any more, so to get them I either have to get a bus into Morningside, where there is a health food store that stocks them, or order them by mail.

I recommend, if you have a choice of Mrs Crimbles corn cakes or Corn Thins, to go for the Corn Thins, but either will be ok.


Date: August 4th, 2009 | Comments: No Comments »

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Morrisons Free From Syrup Sponge Pudding – gluten free, wheat free, dairy free

Shoot the taste testerI’ve been quite hesitant about doing this review, but it has to be done.

On the shopping trip of which I have written before, I bought a Morrisons free from Syrup Sponge Pudding, because hot puddings are something I really miss – at least occasionally. I chose a golden syrup sponge because, I reasoned, there isn’t much that can go wrong with a “treacle pudding”, as I generally call them.

It comes in a sleeve, and is a miniature white pudding basin sealed with a piece of plastic sheeting. I took it out of the sleeve, added ventilation and stuck it in the microwave for the time stated on the packaging. When I removed the “lid” the pudding was about halfway or a little more. There was plenty of room to add anything you would like to. As I generally like a lot more golden syrup than is supplied, I added some, and then a good dollop of squirty cream.

I took a spoonful of the pudding, which had some extra syrup and some cream on the top. When I tasted it, I was surprised to find that it was disgusting. I scraped aside the additions and took a spoonful on its own. It tasted as if it had been eaten by someone else, who had quietly regurgitated it and put it back in the packet – in other words, it tasted like vomit, though the texture was completely different. I tried to eat another spoonful – well half a spoonful absolutely plastered in the extra syrup and cream, but it was inedible even masked in this way. So I ended up throwing it away, which was annoying.

What really got me about this product, apart from the vileness, was the fact that they have written all over the packaging the word “deliciously”. Which presumably means that somebody has taste tested it – but who? I think we should be told.

Having thrown this product away, I was still left with a serious hot-pudding-with-syrup craving – so I cut a slice off the Mrs Crimbles cake I reviewed earlier, poured on a couple of teaspoons of golden syrup and zapped it for a few seconds, then ate it with some cream. It tasted great. And the portion was probably bigger than the one I had just thrown away.

This pudding was priced around the £1.20 mark (can’t remember for sure), so it’s no great loss, but I would advise you – if you see this, do not buy it. You’ll regret it if you do.

Here is the ingredients list (probably a dead giveaway if I had read it before purchase):
Ingredients list


Date: August 1st, 2009 | Comments: No Comments »

Category: Product reviews

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