It kills me that boxed cake mixes are so easy. How does it come out so fluffy and moist and delicious, every time, without any effort? You don't even have to separate the eggs!Why does something I slaved over, sifting flour three times, beating egg whites separately and folding them gently in, using real ingredients... turn out so... blah?
I don't want to prefer the corporate food-like products... but they make it so EASY.
I was shopping for the ingredients for my mom's birthday cake and almost bought a box mix (so cheap! so easy!) but then I looked at the wacko list of ingredients on the side of the box and also knew that I had time to actually bake a real cake this weekend.
I like baking cakes from scratch but have been weary since baking one out of the Joy of Cooking cookbook that came out like a brick. It was very dense. I don't remember offhand which recipe it was, since there are like 300 variations of white cake in that book. I've made a few others since then, from Joy of Cooking and other places, that did not come out like bricks, but I am always hyper-sensitive about it, to the point that I used a box cake for my nephew's first birthday party, because I would have felt really bad if he had a dense, gross cake to smash in his face.
But I also want to learn the secret trick to not making a brick. Is it that my egg whites were not whipped into stiff enough peaks?
Was it what Kalisha's grandma said, that you can't use salted butter? I don't know.I browsed allrecipes.com for a good sounding recipe for white cake, and came up with this one. I was intrigued by the use of almond extract and had to buy some for the recipe. The crumbs I scraped off the pan to eat after it went on the cooling rack tasted pretty good, good enough that I thought I should also add some almond extract to this recipe for chocolate frosting, which I only loosely followed.
I increased the chocolate to 2 ounces and also added 1/4 cup of non hydrogenated vegetable shortening and doubled the milk. I didn't increase the sugar because I didn't want it to be sickeningly sweet. I also added 1/2 teaspoon of almond extract. It came out pretty delicious for chocolate frosting. Maybe would have been better on a not also-almond white cake. I
don't know.
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