Gluten-Free Essentials: Spice Cake and Muffin Mix (Product Review and Pictures)

As you may remember, I have a pesky wheat allergy.  This is especially troubling for me because I love sweet stuff like cake, cookies, muffins... And living in the boondoggles here doesn't exactly put me right smack in the middle of a bustling metropolis where gluten free items are more plentiful.  Ordering online is a godsend!  Recently, Gluten-Free Essentials sent me a package of yummy goodies to try.  You'll be seeing reviews of the other products soon, but today I'm going to focus on Gluten-Free Essential's Spice Cake and Muffin Mix.

Some people have asked me why I just don't bake my own Gluten Free food.  If you ate my regular food, you'd know that I am not Betty Crocker.  I get by and my family doesn't starve, but I prefer prepackaged foods because I know that the spices will be just right versus me trying and tasting and knowing what to add to make it taste better.

Gluten-Free Essentials Spice Cake and Muffin Mix -- Ease of Baking

This 16 oz gluten free dessert needed just the package, 1 stick of butter, 2/3 cup of apple sauce and eggs.  These two non-spanking white eggs were actually farm fresh!  As in just taken from the chicken not too long before they were given to me by a friend.
  

Here's a shot of the mixing bowl with the product.  I smelled the spice cake scent and it smelled so good and yummy.  I couldn't wait to try it.

This is me mixing the ingredients all together.  I don't have a shot of the batter, but let's just say I tasted the raw batter it tasted perfect!

This is the finished product!  They raised nicely and were actually quite moist, something that typically doesn't happen for me when I bake gluten free items.  I think it was the applesauce that made it so moist?  At any rate, these were a hit.  I ate them over a period of two days, with my kids snatching them in between. 

I baked the muffins in Wilton cups, which I had gotten from my kids.  They are silicone and I didn't need to do anything other than pour the batter in them to the fill line.  The yield was 12 muffins, with one bonus one, which I baked in a glass custard dish.  

Things I loved about Gluten-Free Essentials' Spice Cake and Muffin Mix:

• Easy to follow directions.  I needed just a few ingredients other than the mix to make a tasty dessert.  The directions included oven temperature, cooking times and approximate yield, which was fairly spot on for me.  
• Directions for cookies were also included.  Bear in mind, this is a cake/muffin mix.  To make spice cookies, you decrease the amount of applesauce and chill the dough for a while before baking.
• Perfect amount of spice - I really loved the taste of this mix. It had the perfect amount of spices, with no one spice overpowering another.  
• Tasted great to the whole family!  I had to remind the kids that mommy wanted some too! 
• This mix is gluten-free, casein free, lactose free (of course, you add butter later on, but the mix itself is lactose free), dairy free (again, you add eggs to bake it), and Nut and Soy free.  The lack of nuts is something that parents of kids with peanut allergies will cheer over!

Buy It!

Visit Gluten-Free Essentials and peruse their gluten free baking mix category to find this delicious product and many others that will make you hungry enough to place an order. 

Parting Thoughts:

I used this product to make muffins, but you can also use it to make a spice cake and frost it (or the muffins for that matter) with a rich cream cheese frosting that will only enhance the flavor.  This mix is versatile enough to make cookies, which, to me, is a huge plus.

Stay tuned for more Gluten-Free Essentials product reviews coming soon.  I'll be working more this week.

Disclosure:  Gluten-Free Essentials provided me several mixes for review purposes.  I was not compensated to write this review, though the product samples themselves were given to me without cost to me.  The opinions stated herein are 100% my own.