We tried Heinz's mayonnaise, salad cream, and ketchup cupcakes. Here’s the verdict.
It's pretty difficult to ruin a cupcake. Or so you'd think. But somehow the Hummingbird Bakery, a company that's literally famed for its moreish, sumptuous, gooey cupcakes, has committed high treason of the baked goods variety.
Hummingbird Bakery teamed up with Heinz to make cupcakes flavoured with mayonnaise, ketchup, baked beans, tomato soup, and salad cream. The cupcakes will be on sale from Oct. 11 as a special limited edition range celebrating the birthday or Heinz founder Henry J Heinz.
They were not good.
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Some of the cakes had a rather unnerving consistency of wet rubber. While others boasted flavours as fleeting as the men in my love life. Make of that what you will.
As I write this, I feel perilously close to chucking up all over my keyboard. Forgive me for that rather visceral imagery but what you're about to read may induce extreme nausea and feelings of extreme outrage.
Look upon my face shortly before trying the cupcakes. So full of hope. So optimistic. So far away from puking.
Salad Cream cupcake
This cupcake was sweating upon arrival at the Mashable offices. It was melting in a distinctly toxic waste-like way. When I picked up the moist, frosting-lathered cake, it left behind a trickle of indistinguishable green liquid. No one wants to eat a cake that leaves a slick of liquid behind it.
But eat it I most certainly did.
In terms of presentation, our first impressions were not great. "It looks like paste," my editor Shannon Connellan said as we braced ourselves to take our very first bite.
You know what? It wasn't bad. Anyone who's ever watched the Great British Bake Off will know full well that looks can be deceiving. Fundamentally, what matters most is taste.
Ketchup cupcake
I touched it and it wobbled, which is honestly never a good sign. If I'd thrown it on the ground, it would have bounced. So, yeah, biting into it is a moment I'd like to permanently erase from my memory.
Shannon came up with a perfect précis regarding the cupcake's unusual flavour.
"You know when you leave ketchup on your plate for too long and then it solidifies? Then you try and like push a chip into it and it's formed a skin. That's what it tastes like," she said.
So...congealed ketchup.
Heinz Beanz cupcake
It was the texture that killed the ketchup cupcake. Rubbery, under-baked, and really quite wet. Paul Hollywood would have sent home the baker responsible for this monstrosity. But sadly for me, I put it in my mouth.
After biting into the cake, and wading through a mound of orange frosting, I could just about make out the presence of the odd bean. Regrettably, the beans did not taste like baked beans. Just tasteless round objects that had somehow made their way into cake batter.
Mayonnaise cupcake
The "seriously good" label on this cupcake belies the true flavour of this cupcake which was decidedly average at best. It was by far the best cupcake of the five we received. That's because it tasted not a jot like mayonnaise. It was a perfectly adequate piece of confectionary. Not disgusting, but also entirely forgettable.
Tomato soup cupcake
Soup is not a cupcake flavour. Let's just clear that up right away.
This was by far the very worst cupcake that passed my lips. When I cut into this rubbery mess, the slices just kind of slumped over like it's had one too many M&S tins of gin and tonic. It was wet — alarmingly so.
If Paul Hollywood had been present, he'd have sneered "that's raw dough." Mary Berry's "soggy bottom" would have been too generous an epithet to bestow upon this creature from the black lagoon.
After chewing the dense and cold cake, I realised what it reminded me of: undercooked Yorkshire pudding. When I said this aloud my colleague Khali said, "Uhhh no, Yorkshire pudding is actually good."
This cupcake could not have been further from good.
I was left with a very sore tummy and no desire whatsoever to eat another cupcake anytime soon.
The Heinz x Hummingbird Bakery range is available to buy from all six branches of The Hummingbird Bakery in London from Oct. 11 to 20 priced at £3.25 - £3.90 per cupcake.
Rachel Thompson is the Features Editor at Mashable. Rachel's second non-fiction book The Love Fix: Reclaiming Intimacy in a Disconnected World is out now, published by Penguin Random House in Jan. 2025. The Love Fix explores why dating feels so hard right now, why we experience difficult emotions in the realm of love, and how we can change our dating culture for the better.
A leading sex and dating writer in the UK, Rachel has written for GQ, The Guardian, The Sunday Times Style, The Telegraph, Cosmopolitan, Glamour, Stylist, ELLE, The i Paper, Refinery29, and many more.
Rachel's first book Rough: How Violence Has Found Its Way Into the Bedroom And What We Can Do About It, a non-fiction investigation into sexual violence was published by Penguin Random House in 2021.
