The Ugly Cake Shop: Cakes with a conscience

PUBLISHED June 12th, 2014 02:09 am | UPDATED April 18th, 2016 06:01 pm

Let’s face it, as much as we love stuffing our faces with cake, it is usually and ultimately a very selfish act, based on the pure pleasure factor attributed to yours truly. But what if we told you that you could have your cake and eat it by doing a good deed at the same time? Hmmm suddenly those cakes taste even better than before!

Cue The Ugly Cake Shop, an online purveyor of cakes with a difference. How so? The Ugly Cake Shop is a social enterprise which seeks to help feed undernourished children and youth in Timor-Leste, a place where even an egg is a delicacy – let alone a slice of cake!

With a truly scrumptious selection of whole cakes, cupcakes, loaf cakes, brownies and other delicious delights, Ugly Cakes are all handmade with love and high quality ingredients like French cocoa powder, shunning the use of unnecessary extra sugar or artificial flavours or colours, which scores them another brownie point in our books.

We locked our chops around a Big Daddy Junior ($3.50 each) – a super chocolatey cupcake with Nutella and Valrhona buttercream; a Melissa ($4.50 each) – a dark chocolate cupcake with strawberry buttercream made purely with strawberry puree and enlivened with rum as well as and not forgetting everyone’s favourite – a salted caramel cupcake by the name of Juliana ($3.80). P.S. if you’re wondering what’s with the names they are all named after people the folks at Ugly Cakes hold dear.

If you’re more of a proper cake kind of person, we highly recommend the Kamski a.k.a Lemon Drizzle Cake ($20 for two loaves) which was beautifully moist and tangy and then our absolute favourite – the Maria ($20 for a box of 15 pieces), an intensely chocolatey fudge brownie.

In all truth, all of them sent us to cake heaven but knowing that essentially every cake we tucked into helped us to feed hungry kids – one Ugly cake at a time – made them taste all the more better. Most cakes come with a minimum order, starting at 6 for the cupcakes or two for the loaves, but seeing as you’re doing a really good thing in buying these babies, that makes them absolutely perfect for sharing their all-round goodness. Cakes are delivered within three days so a little advanced planning is necessary but well worth it.

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Written by Ms Demeanour