Not yet at the whipping-up-a-casual-Vic-Sponge stage of lockdown — but still reached the point where you want more interactivity from your desserts than the Iceland Party Food range can offer?
We've rounded up the restaurants, caffs, bakeries and market stalls sending out DIY kits to keep your hands busy and face sticky.
Doughnut Time - the Biscoff doughnut
The Biscoff is a sticky fist of dough, which you glaze with a thick layer of caramel, top with chocolate sauce, fill to swollen with Biscoff spread, and garnish with extra biscuits. If that sounds like it might be Too Much for you then it's a certainty that it is: the description pales next to the gloopy reality.
You'll need: maybe a shower after: this stuff gets everywhere.
How much: £20 for a kit, makes four doughnuts.
Delivery: free for orders of more than £30, delivery across the UK on weekdays only.
Crazy Pizza — the tiramisu kit
Crazy Pizza, one of the international string of glossy Italian restaurants from Flavio Briatore, are making things really easy for you on the DIY front. Their tiramisu delivery kit comes with everything you need: apron, cocoa-dusting sieve, a little tub of coffee pre-prepped for you, vanilla cream already stuffed into a piping bag, (no alcohol in this one), and some exuberant — but relatively idiotproof — instructions.
At a wallet-busting £30 for the adult-sized kit, the cost per fluffy, rich forkful is high — but the kit comes with enough ribbons, frills and lasting souvenirs to make this a great gift.
You'll need: just a serving plate — everything else is in the kit, down to the apron and sieve for dusting the cocoa.
How much: £30 — makes two servings.
Delivery: in a radius of their Marylebone and Knightsbridge venues.
Chin Chin Labs - the Griddled Cookie Dough mix
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This one's more of a just-add-liquid style baking mix — think Betty Crocker pre-packs — than an interactive DIY extravaganza. So limited bespokeability, but brilliant and fairly idiotproof end result, and you can peacock to your heart's content with different ice cream/sour cream/stuff-that-isn't-even-cream toppings. Notable home efforts we've seen on Instagram include a fresh-from-oven cookie topped with a stiffly-whipped pile of Dalgona coffee.
You'll need: vegetable oil and an oven, and any extra frills like ice cream you want to add.
How much: £8.95 (£1 from each kit goes to a charity supporting UCLH staff impacted by coronavirus)
Delivery: £3.95, across London.
Pleesecakes - the cheesecake
This is, up against some strong contenders, the most OTT dessert on this list. Frozen cheesecake kings Pleesecakes have come up with a DIY delivery kit that matches up to the hyper-intense, heavily-loaded lavishness of their in-house creations.
Arriving frozen, the DIY's all in the decorating, with no baking involved. Options are the Pick 'n' Mix version, which comes with white chocolate ganache topping and a lot — A Lot — of Haribo-y toppings, or the Fully Loaded, with milk chocolate gananche, chocolate crumble pot, and such an enormous number of all-chocolate toppings that we only managed to use 2/3 and our cake still threatened to buckle pleasingly under the weight of it. We've seen more heavily loaded efforts than ours on Instagram, so the issue's with our topping placement/counterbalancing choices rather than the structural integrity of the cake.
Choose between a classic vanilla and digestive base, or if you were worried something might pass your lips that didn't involve chocolate in some way, a double chocolate and salted caramel version.
You'll need: no equipment, but ideally 12-14 people to help you out with the eating of it.
How much: options from £28-£32.
Delivery: £8, across London.
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Shuk - the babka
These Borough market stalwarts are doing a chocolate, hazelnut and cookie crumb DIY babka (and apparently a date, pistachio and dark chocolate version's also in the works). More effortful than some of the glaze-and-go desserts on this list, but the payoff's a kitchen that smells of freshly baked pastry and warm Tel Aviv evenings. Babka's also quite high reward for the effort involved — looks ornate, but it's actually within reach for anybody who can plait something.
You'll need: an egg and an oven. Everything else (pastry brush, rolling pin, etc.) you can probably improv.
How much: £20 for one babka, or £32 for two, with free delivery.
Delivery: Free within the M25, with delivery slots available from Wednesday to Saturday. Delivery slots are made available online seven days ahead.
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The Good Egg - another babka
You know how it is: you wait years for a bake-your-own babka kit, and then two come along at once. This one takes a bit more effort than Shuk's: more ingredients/equipment needed, more mixing and elbow grease involved. If you're in it for the joy of baking itself, should be satisfying.
You'll need: milk or milk substitute, a loaf tin, baking parchment, oven.
How much: £24 for one kit.
Delivery: £7.50, delivery slots across London.
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Where The Pancakes Are - the pancake feast box
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Pancake like a pro with these chilled kits, featuring everything you need for a big North American-style stack (though with the buttermilk swapped out for keffir). Each kit comes with the makings of the pancake mix itself, and a promisingly intense amount of toppings — bananas, bacon, blueberries and maple syrup. This is good DIY kit territory, being simple if you just want to follow the rules but still easy to throw big extra flourishes into if you're feeling flamboyant.
*Peanut butter, is what we're trying to say. You can add your own peanut butter.
You'll need: bowl, pan — just the usual kitchen stuff.
How much: £29.50, makes about 6 servings.
Delivery: Delivery across London — price varies depending on location.
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