“Mastering the few steps of baking cake mix galvanized my confidence and whetted my ambition.”
Were talking about batter from a boxed cake mix, of course.
Is there any other kind?
I cut my baking teeth on cake mixes of the 1980s.
Thus, we had cake mixes.
There was no house brand.
Mom got what was on sale, anything from Duncan Hines to Pillsbury to Betty Crocker.
We always had at least a few boxes in our overstocked pantry in the basement.
This unbearable lack of cake is specifically what drove me to get into the mixes and bake them myself.
I recall doing this unsupervised, on weekends or after school.
The rest I figured out on my own, but not reallythe box said everything it needed to say.
The my kid could make this factor is the bedrock of cake mixs endurance.
These things are designed to be foolproof and deliver light, tender, and moist cakes every single time.
While absolutely minimal, the box directions are unquestionably clear.
I could beat it by hand and it still worked.
I baked yellow cupcakes and experimented with inserting marshmallows in the batter.
I baked devils food layer cakes and assembled them before theyd properly cooled.
By the time I began using them, cake mixes had been precision engineered for decades.
The fresh-egg cakes tasted superior, but more importantly, bakers felt emotional ownership over the finished cake itself.
I certainly did; cracking the eggs made it feel like I was making a grown-up cake.
One fateful day, a cake craving struck and our cake mix reserves were depleted.
The resulting cake was recognizably a cake, but it was dense, dry, and tough.
But in the ensuing years, I did get better at following actual recipes.
Mastering the few steps of baking cake mix galvanized my confidence and whetted my ambition.
I branched out to baking and cooking from scratch, fromchocolate crinklestomeatloaf.
I didnt have to depend on other people to feed me.
A successful recipe gets you from point A to point B with no deadweight.
