link to the original post: https://www.reddit.com/r/coolguides/comments/kcssfx/cake/
Cake mix is not the way to go because it's "american trash" and "plasticky garbage"
This one's quite nice. An appeal to their own authority ("hundreds of cakes" even!), overly combative tone, hyperbolic disparagement of the thing they don't like (cakes from mix are not merely bad, they're inedible), excessive verbosity relative to the point they're actually making, mentions of vague "processing", and a soupçon of anti-Americanism as a garnish. All in all, a beautiful, balanced dish of an IAVC comment
Ahh yes, it would pair wonderfully with boxed whine.
This reminds me of the Baker who, on /r/confessions or something, described how she used boxed cake mixes (and maybe did some of these substitutions?) and how she won awards and everyone raved about her cakes.
Considering cake mix is just pre measured and premixed dry ingredients I can see why.
It’s like wanting to find the roots of an equation and starting with the quadratic equation rather than deriving it.
But what about the CheMiCaLS?
That’s how a lot of yuropeens act, like if you labeled water as dihydrogen monoxide, they’re going to call it American and that it tastes plasticky
Everyone knows that the overly processed crap Americans use doesn't even count as water
only if it is from flint
Yep, exactly like quadra equines, for sure, I know math too
If you're not making the base ingredients (by which I mean the very base ingredients of the base ingredients of the base ingredients of the base ingredients) than it's inedible, pre-made, pre-made cooked dogshit and you should be ashamed of yourself! You can't call yourself a baker if you buy flour from a grocery store!
And you better have made that cheese yourself! If you didn't cultivate that mold on that bleu cheese that you made yourself, it's not real bleu cheese!
Im sure rhag if you were a semi successful small bakery, making your own cake mixes could be useful to save time on each order
On one of Alton Brown's Good Eats he makes something, I think it was about icings or the like, but he starts with a boxed cake mix and confesses he prefers them stating that they contain dough conditioners that help moisture and texture and what not. It's the same stuff pro bakers use, and you can buy such stuff from King Arthur flour.
In her defence, she would hand decorate them like crazy, was just the cake that wasn't handmade.
She also edited to say she eventually learned to make it from scratch.
Ah, yet another denizen of culture who thinks we get all our celebratory cakes from the cooler at Wal Mart.
I do love in the comments where somehow bakery cakes are also trash that taste like flour and cocoa. Where??? What bakery serves that???
I'll have to inform my local bakery they're doing it wrong. Very lucky here, we have lots of options for cakes/pies/desserts. Everything from our grocery stores, bakeries, and a few Mexican restaurants/tienditas. One of the restaurants makes great Tres leches cake.
My fave local bakery makes a lemon drop cake. I get it every year for my birthday. The people who own it were on Cupcake Wars back in the mid 2000's.
If I bake a cake, it's box mix. The brand I like out of all of those options is KA.
I think you missed the great value 'raw flour and cocoa powder' cake. It's between to the mandatory hot dog purchase section and red solo cups.
I didn’t know “food engineers” were lying to us
Ok, but Wegmans makes a great sheet cake. And I won’t say no to a Costco cake either.
My wedding cake came from Hy-Vee.
Well, I admit I did get my son's birthday party cake (a cupcake cake, no less) from Wal-Mart this weekend, but it was for 6 year olds who love sickly sweet. It was a volcano with dinosaurs, so that was cool though.
Walmart cakes always make me so sick, I wish I could buy another type of cake anywhere in this big ass country 😔
It's so sad for you Americans that Walmart has decimated the cake ecosystem and natural cakes have gone extinct.
Edit: This is a joke.
My grandpappy told me stories of them cakes, how they roamed free in the buttercream fields. Some say there's still a German chocolate hiding in the PNW, my uncle saw it one time, but that's just legends.
I heard all the German chocolate cakes fled to Argentina.
I'm not really a cake person (ironic since I love to make them) but that particular kind of cake, with its metallicky frosting and weird preternatural fluffiness, I avoid fervently. Which is fine, because then all you do is pass your plate to the next person! It's an office party, Brenda, not a night out with Jay Rayner.
It's a mutually beneficial relationship with the office garbage disposals like me.
Meanwhile they'd be besides themselves if they had any idea just how damn good a Costco cake is
“I like less sugar, so I use a 1/3 cup instead of a 1/4 cup.”
What?
Honest to god, I think we make it too easy for some people to graduate high school.
LOL. Reminds me of the story where fast food places tried to one up others going from a 1/4 pounder to a 1/3 pounder, but if failed because it was seen as 3 < 4.
My sister has lived overseas a big chunk of her life and there's a few things that when she's in America she makes sure to eat. Boxed cake mix is one of those things. Better tasting is more emotional and complex than "from scratch is objectively better".
Every time this discourse comes up it baffles me. Not everyone has the time to whip up a cake from scratch. Not to mention pre mixed box cake is a great way to teach children how to cook, or a good option for disabled people to bake…
But that would mean they have to consider people other than themselves!
Boxed cake mix is just the dry ingredients already mixed together; there's like no difference between it and a homemade other than you don't have to measure out the ingredients yourself.
Eh, there’s other stuff in there, but I don’t really care. The mixes are a lot easier than me baking a few hundred cake recipes trying to find one that’s as good.
I do it so that I can spend more time decorating the cake.
Eh, you certainly can use a box mix when baking with kids but it's clearly less educational than showing them the individual ingredients and quantities before you mix it
I mean, if your REAL ACTUAL PROFESSIONAL BAKERY in not-America does any amount of volume, they're definitely using pre-mixed ingredients for whatever cakes they put out.
Nah, they're growing and grinding their own wheat flour and growing sugarcane to process into the granulated sugar and they've got chickens out back for the eggs, and they make their own alcohol to ferment the vanilla beans in (that they personally go to Madagascar to grow) to make the extract, unlike those FILTHY AMERICANS and their CONVENIENCE PRODUCTS. PLASTIC! PLAAAAAASTIIIIICCCC!
one of the reasons premixed is used is that baking is much more a science than an art, you need precise measurements and consistency. One way to get these things without using a premix is to make large volumes of essentially the same cake, if you are making a single cake 10 grams here or there is a huge error, but if you are making a cake that is 10 or so times larger that 10 gram error is much smaller, the professional bakeries that are not using a premix are instead making large volumes of cakes, it is just a different way to get the same precision.
My favorite part of this one is that it took until the fourth time reading the first sentence to read it in any way than that using real vanilla was an example of a way to screw it up. I figured it out, but decided to stick with my original interpretation, they’re so insufferable
Same here.
This is baffling to me. I'm a pretty able home baker and have made many a cake in my day, and with generally good results. For the vast majority of people, the difference between "good box mix" and "homemade from scratch" is a small enough that they will not notice or care. Same with real vs artificial vanilla, when I save the real stuff for when vanilla is the standout flavour, but a triple chocolate cake? Artificial is fine. Fucks sake. Enjoy a cake and be happy.
IMO most home bakers get better results with mixes.
the reason for that is baking needs precision, on the small scale a single cake is much more vulnerable to precision errors, but you can side step this using a cake mix because cake mixes are made in large batches, any inaccuracies in measurement disappear from the scale you are doing things at.
You can do just as well at home measuring by weight with a gram scale. But yeah if you're using volume based measures, all bets are off.
I suspect many of these people have never had good box cake, there's a big difference. Just spend a couple extra bucks for the highest quality.
KA makes pretty good box and frosting mix.
Where I live (a sizeable Canadian city) there is one box mix generally available... Betty Crocker. It's $3 and not great.
This strikes at the core of it.
Let people make their cakes how they choose and be happy. Who cares.
Vanilla cake mix with fruit soda like orange soda is so fucking good. I'm not really a cake person but that shit is fucking phenomenal.
https://www.cupcakediariesblog.com/easy-orange-creamsicle-cake/
I’ve worked as a baker and bake a lot at home, mostly experimenting or for other people. For myself though? Gimme that classic yellow box mix with canned chocolate icing.
This is genuinely one of my favourite cakes of all time. It can't be beat. Homemade is not the same.
ive made cakes from scratch and ive made cakes from the box. the difference is negligible
And if you have a chance to try the 'hack' that involves yellow cake mix and instant vanilla pudding, but with your own imaginative upgrades ... do it! that's the base for my infamous Drunken Pirate Cake . Super versatile to mess around with. Box mixes are useful as heck, and I will die on this hill!
Drunken Pirate Cake? I’m imagining rum and pineapple are involved…
Rum and orange peel shards. And allspice. And walnuts. Because im too poor to Macadamia that shit.
The rum is homemade and extra flammable. It's not competition level, but heck yeah for cooking. Its the Grade D maple syrup of rums... saturate the nearest spiced pound cake left out for Staff Appreciation day, and run away before you get busted!!!
Homemade rum?!?!?!?! WOW. I aspire to get on your level!
This is obligatory for any "cake mix BAD" thread. I'm guessing it's the one the ODbag is whining about.
New flair just dropped!
Instructions for fancy quick dessert:
Make cake mix
Top with a quick sauce made from cooking fruit with sugar
Maybe put some chocolate shavings or some shit like that on top idk
plasticky garbage
RESET THE CLOCK!
also a bonus point for misspelling plastic
OP is a snob, but that is the correct way to spell plasticky. The extra "k" fixes the pronunciation, because plasticy could be "plas-tissy"
huh, today i learned
Perfect, no notes.
Cake mix is literally premixed (“from scratch”) ingredients. I swear Yuropeens really have Americans on the mind 24/7.
It’s almost a fetish with them
Funny enough the original post actually has some really good comments and discussion.
Lots of people are talking about how and what different fats do in baking.
As for the 'no self respecting bakery would use cake mix'. They're right, they make it themselves because doing so at scale is insanely cheaper. So they do use cake mix, it's just an in house cake mix because they buy the components in bulk.
A sheet cake is a sheet cake for a bakery. They're not going to craft original artisan recipes every time they have to make one. They're going to weigh out their stuff and make the sheet cake or 12 sheet cakes or 50 sheet cakes. That's how baking at scale works.
What you do in your kitchen with the box of cake mix has almost nothing to do with what professional cake makers do besides the fact that you're both making cakes.
It's like making a knife in your garage from a kit and thinking you're Spyderco. It's buying a bag of apples and running an orchard. The needs and tricks of the two are not the same and the rest of the drivel written there fundamentally doesn't even address this despite conflating the two.
Look, I'm not going to argue that most foods when made from scratch with care and attention detail aren't better than something processed or done amateurishly, but people like this act like it's a binary between edible and inedible. And boxed cake mix specifically is loved for what it is.
In fact, anecdote: I make a lot of food for my wife's get togethers with her employees, but I am not really a sweets baker at all, so when I was asked to make a cake, I just made a boxed mix. The employees raved about it and asked me for the recipe 😂 I didn't try to hide it at all. I gave it credit to Betty Crocker.
Let’s say I own a bakery. I pay people to work for me. Their job is to measure out ingredients, mix them in machines, and bake the resulting batter into cakes.
Why is it so important that all the people I pay must be my direct employees and work in my building? Why would it be so bad if some of them worked for a cake mix company and did their work in a separate building?
I like making cakes from scratch and do 95% of the time, but I have a nostalgic love for boxed yellow cake. It's also handy to use in crusts for pumpkin (or lemon) bars.
Bakeries absolutely use cake mix it's just fucking flour and sugar
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