Cake in a jar - the perfect gift

Jasmine and Alex helped me make some pink and yellow cakes in jars. We'd heard about cakes in a cup before but had never tried making them. It is their cousin's birthday on the weekend and of course it is mother's day too so we had some great reasons to try out this new activity. We were inspired by the amazing cakes on blogs.babble.com. With so many of us sick this week, we decided to postpone our playgroup catch up.

We used a Betty Crocker lemon cake mix. First, pour the mixture into a bowl, add 60g butter, 2 eggs and 2/3 cup water. Mix with electric beaters. Divide into two batches and stir in food colouring - whatever shade suits your mood. We used yellow and pink.

I had been diligently putting aside jars in my kitchen cupboard, mostly from the kids' jams and honey. These were ideal for today's activity.

Scoop 1/2 cup mixture into a jar and cook in the microwave for 1 to 2 minutes. You don't want to put too much mixture into the jar as it will rise up over the jar and look rather messy. You can probably guess that's what happened to me on my first go.

Take the jar out of the microwave. Be careful not to burn yourself. The jar becomes amazingly hot in such a short period of time. While the cake is cooling, prepare some icing and sprinkles. Following our Betty Crocker theme, we used pre-made vanilla icing and added some pink food colouring to match the cake. Lastly we added some sprinkles.

Don't you think these cakes in a jar look fabulous! What a fun gift. You can also play around with other approaches such as cooking the cakes in jars in the oven. For this method, I believe you put the cakes in a tray of shallow water. Cooking time is more like 40 minutes. Or you can cook the cake in a normal cake tin and then crumble into jars, mixing with cream, icing and sprinkles. Or maybe add jelly too. I think I could become quite addicted to cakes in a jar!