Yellow Cake Part 1 - Box Cake

Many people, if they endeavor to create cake at all, choose to make cake from a box. Whether one of the more popular, instantly recognized name cakes or a lesser known, top shelf, hoity-toity cake, they elect the box cake path none-the-less. Considering the disadvantages of preservatives, old ingredients and artificial flavoring, there must be some great, hidden advantage of a cake mix.

Why would a person elect to bake a box cake unless they felt a significant benefit? Box cake must be, after all, considered factory food containing a long list of unpronounceable chemical concoctions to give the ingredients shelf-lives of mythical proportions. Why, if you are going to go through the trouble of baking a cake, would you not choose to bake it from ingredients you selected? Instead, people are using mixes of unknown origin.

A few reasons for using box cake mix can be imagined: If a person lacked confidence and bought into the myth of baking difficultly, the box cake could provide a certain confidence that things would turn out okay. If a body lacked time and believed a box cake would mix and bake faster, this would certainly encourage sacrificing better cake for convenience.

To be fair, I did not know whether boxed mix or hand-measured ingredients created the superior cake. Perhaps the box cake could be mixed and baked faster but I was not sure, nor do I suffer a fear of baking. But I did desire to know why. In the end I decided to get more, objective information. To satisfy my curiosity, and like a good scientist, to validate my foregone conclusion, I decided to set up and conduct an experiment. First I would acquire and cook a box cake.

The experiment setup took little effort. The box cake, from a company with a well-known name, was purchased during a normal shopping trip, brought home, mixed and cooked. Mixing took no time at all. After assembling eggs, milk, sugar and oil, only 13 minutes passed from opening the box to putting the pan in the oven. Not bad at all. Since both milk and eggs were produced in this neck of the woods, the cake qualifies for making something with local ingredients. The batter looked okay. It took on a bright yellow appearance that seemed more than natural, but it was smooth and creamy. The only unpleasant element I observed was a very unpleasant odor. The smell was familiar but not familiar; a sweet, artificial, almost chemical assault of the nostrils most likely produced by artificial vanilla or dried milk in the mix. Behind the flavor of the batter was a chemical sweet taste that faded into a strong, bitter aftertaste.

The cake baked up nicely. When it was cooled, a frosting, from a can manufactured by the same easily recognized name as was the cake, was applied. In a taste test, the bitterness was gone but the cake still smelled like inexpensive cupcakes sometimes seen at the checkout aisle. The texture felt a bit dry, though moist enough to enjoy. Well, good enough for me to enjoy. On a scale of ten with ten being a ten, this was a 4 or 5.

Next, hand-measured yellow cake from a recipe published by the same easily recognized brand name.

copyright 2005 Chromia Poetics