whenever I feel bad about having a weird name I remind myself that C.S. Lewis’ middle name was Staples
When I was a kid, one of my family members quoted the first line of Dawn Treader—“There was a boy named Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it"—and I said, “Brave words from a man whose name was Clive Staples Lewis,” and my mom lost it.
If y’all use a decent box mix and use melted butter instead of vegetable oil, an extra egg, and milk instead of water, no one can tell the difference. I sure as hell can’t.
Also, if you add a little almond extract to vanilla cake, or a little coffee to chocolate cake, it sends it through the roof.
This concludes me attempting to be helpful.
yo I can vouch for this I’ve done this for the last few cakes I’ve made and holy crap it makes suuuuch a difference the cake is still fluffy, but it also seems more dense, and it doesn’t dry out like at all you can leave it uncovered on the counter all day after being cut into, and it won’t get all crusty and dry this is an amazing way to take your cakes to the next level
Does this count as cake hacks?
cake: hacked
OK but if you’re adding all that to the mix why not just scratch bake? There are literally only four ingredients you’re NOT adding yourself at this point.
It’s always so baffling when mix hackers give you a whole ass cake recipe. Like there’s some kind of magic to mixes that needs to form the core of the thing instead of just, a couple dry ingredients and powdered milk.
presumably as a step of intermediate complexity between mix baking and scratch baking, when neither of those fits your complexity needs exactly?
In particular, this is a useful technique for people living in dorms, or traveling, or similar situations!
Baking from scratch means you’ve got to buy a whole tin of baking powder and only use a spoonful, and a whole thing of flour, and maybe multiple kinds of sugar, and maybe cocoa powder, maybe spices, and there’s no way you’re going to use up any of those, you’ll just have to pitch them when you move out.
Not to mention that you’ve got maybe one measuring cup, and there’s no way you’ve got a sifter, and you probably don’t have measuring spoons and how sure are you that your eating spoon is actually the right size…
Scratch baking is great if you’re going to do it regularly! But for situations where it doesn’t make sense to invest in all the tools and ingredients, cake mixes are very practical.
Scratch means you have to worry about ratios. Scratch means you have to keep cake flour on hand. Scratch means you don’t get the benefit of some of the CHEMICALS in the mix that are 100% beneficial to excellent cake.
I bake some things from scratch. Anything requiring creaming a mix is basically a sad joke because all the work is the creaming. Standard cake is not one of them.
Of course, me being me, a standard cake is usually just a component – I don’t actually like “just cake” that much and canned frosting is terrible. So while I don’t scratch bake cake, that cake is getting saturated with tres leches, or put in a trifle, or getting add-ins before baking anyway.
But in a larger sense, who cares? Baking is hard and for fun anyway. Why bake-shame someone?
Just FYI… A LOT of professional bakers (probably more than half) in the US at least use doctored mixes rather than scratch ingredients even for their more expensive cakes like wedding cakes. There are whole forums where they talk about this amongst themselves.
In taste tests they’ve found that while customers may ask for a cake from scratch they often end up preferring the taste and texture of the doctored mixes when all is said and done.
Unless you have some particular allergies or some other reason to avoid box mixes they are often the better way to go.
I’ve been looking into opening up a home bakery and part of the task of producing food for the public is making sure your items are standardized so that every person who gets a cupcake (for instance) is getting the same quality, size, etc., etc.
Doctored mixes really help with that since big companies like Duncan Hines buys in larger quantities, can afford to test/discard bad batches and will rarely have a one-off batch of flour or flavoring that are bad or go bad like you can at home.
Nice seeing this going around again!
My standard cake is box mix + milk for water + melted butter for oil + dash vanilla extract + frosting from scratch. This really seems to hit the right spot for people of “mmm, homemade” but also “exactly like Mom used to make.” (Do that for a yellow cake with chocolate buttercream frosting, add candles, and serve to a college student, for the maximum “this is exactly what I didn’t want to admit I wanted” potential.)
Seconding the addition of coffee to chocolate cake; a tablespoon of instant coffee powder in a dark chocolate cake makes it taste chocolatey-er without actually adding a perceptible coffee flavor (I don’t like coffee flavor, personally, and I still do this).
Another good option is a box lemon cake mix plus maybe 3 lemons. Zest the lemons, set the zest aside, then juice them and use that in place of the water; then use the zest to flavor the frosting. Adds a nice fresh kick.
Chocolate chips can be dumped straight into chocolate cake mix without fussing with anything to compensate. Sprinkles can go into white cake mix to make your own “confetti cake” with any specific color combo you like. Any kind of dried fruit can be chopped to raisin-size, soaked in hot water (or, better yet, hot juice with a couple of citrus peels added) for an hour, drained, and then added to batter.
Replacing part (up to maybe 1/3) of the water with yogurt (and then the rest with milk as usual) will give you a denser cake; make sure to check if it’s cooked through, and bake a little longer if necessary.
Swirling things through batter for that fancy marbled look is easy. Consider melting chocolate chips with butter, or mixing brown sugar with cinnamon and a little melted butter, or making up two different cake mixes and swirling those together.
I swear by the Cake Mix Doctor’s two cookbooks (one’s general, one’s specifically for chocolate cakes). I think every birthday cake I had as a child was out of those.
I started in my early days by using Betty Crocker mixes – an expensive import in Northern Ireland at the time, but very convenient since some of them were complete kits including a foil cake-tin. They also included cakes I’d never heard of – Red Velvet, Devil’s Food and Angel Food (why not Angel’s Food?)
NB, Angel Cake over here is a completely different thing made up of coloured layers.
After a while, with my Mum’s help, I started tweaking with an extra egg here, a bit of cream there, and the results were always good.
Though @dduane is a far better
cake-baker than I’ll ever be, she also uses mixes to see how they stack up
against made-from-scratch versions especially if the mixes produce something
Really Nice – like, for instance, Betty Crocker brownies – or are more convenient with no huge drop in quality…..
Here’s an example: about 10 years ago
Kremówka Papieska / “The Pope’s Cream Cake” was mentioned as one of the EU 50th-birthday cakes, and DD made it from scratch.
A bit later we found Gellwe-brand mix in one of our local branches of Polonez, and tried that too. The home-made one was definitely better, but the boxed version was also very good, needed only basic extras – milk, butter, sugar etc. – and took far less time to make (though after tasting the custard we added a bit extra vanilla extract…)
That’s why we still have a box in the store-cupboard.
Just in case one or both of us feel like pontifficating… :->
What if instead of gilly weed Harry had showed up to the black lake challenge in muggle scuba gear like “like where’s your advanced magic now bitches? Got me a free fishing knife with this thing”
Honestly I just want an AU where Harry approached all his magical problems with muggle solutions. Nobody knows how to handle it because he’s supposed to be there learning magic but you know what, it fucking works.
Give me Harry Potter who is like fucking MacGuyver up in this shit, creating his own non-magical solutions to magical problems.
“Potter how did you get past the enchanted keys to the Sorcerer’s Stone?”
“I used a fucking net.”
“How did you get past the dragon?”
Harry shines a little red light on the wall “works on cats, why not a dragon”
“How did you get through the hedge maze?”
“Weed-b-gone, it’s like a pound. Nothing will ever grow there again”
“How did you kill He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named?”
“Shotgun.”
I’m crying
it would’ve been so cool if harry remembered what hermione had said about wizards and logic back in their first year (and/or read “hogwarts, a history”) and he’s just started trying out muggle solutions
“harry let’s steal dad’s car”
“ron if it was that easy to get to hogwarts we wouldn’t have to take a train. i just found out about floo powder a few days ago – i think people would be using that if it was actually an option”
“it’s fine we’ll just follow the train tracks”
“okay. how?”
“what?”
“how? where do the train tracks start? we come to king’s cross to get to platform 9 ¾, but it’s pretty clearly not at the station itself. otherwise, people would see it. also, hogwarts has been around for four hundred years. do you really think we’re the first people who’ve had transportation issues?”
“well then… what do we do?“
“well, i was going to suggest writing dumbledore, but it’d be pretty hard to do that discreetly with so many muggles around. but hey, if your parents drove here, they’re probably going to drive home, right? let’s just wait until they get back, and then we can explain the situation.”
“but then we’ll miss the train!”
“we miss the train either– you just want to drive a flying car.”
each time I wriggle out of my exoskeleton, I am larger and stronger than ever before, but… there is a brief window of time in which I am very soft and delicate indeed
I work at a coffee shop and have gotten all my co-workers to start calling lattes “hot milkybois”
I also got everyone to refer to the salted caramel blended drink as “the big salty” and I consider it one of my greatest accomplishments
Oh yeah and any time someone orders a hazelnut latte with almond milk (which specifically is a weirdly popular drink) I say “one HOT NUT latte coming right up!”
My coworkers have not latched on to this one like they did with the others for some reason.
I forgot to mention I also pronounce “hot chocolate” like “hot cocklate”… because I’m awful.
please give us updates
Our largest drink size is affectionately referred to as “Texas Size” so sometimes when I hand it out in the drive-thru I like to say, “Here’s that TEXAS SIZE [drink] for ya, YEEEEHAW!”
And some people look at me as though I have just made their entire day while others look like they they could not possibly get away from me soon enough. Both reactions are equally satisfying.
I made this into a game except when I hand out the Texas-size drinks I say “Can I get a YEEHAW?” And the guests always look mortified but occasionally one of them will let out a terrified “yeehaw” and all my coworkers cheer and then we keep a running tally of how many yeehaws we each get on the back of a pastry bag.
Variously Backup 