Yellow Cake Part 2 - A Modern Recipe

After tasting and testing Yellow Cake from a box, the next step in the experiment was to bake a Yellow Cake from a recipe. To keep things apples-to-apples, a recipe was selected from a cookbook published under the same name as appeared on the box of the box-cake.

With all the ingredients near at hand, it took seven minutes longer to measure and mix the cake from the cookbook than it took to mix the cake from the box. On a good day, it would probably take less time to go from raw ingredients to cake pan, but this was not a good day.

Pulling the ingredients together felt better than dumping all the dry stuff from a box. The flour came from a reputable company, unbleached and lacking preservatives. Granted sugar was sugar. (I am not much of a cane sugar fan. If not for the experiment, the sugar would have been replaced with honey and barley but apples-to-apples and all that.) Vanilla came from a bean, milk from a cow and eggs from a chicken that resides down the road. All the ingredients were hand-picked for their origins, at least at some level, and lacked chemicals with names too long to remember and packed with too many consonants to pronounce.

Though the recipe did not call for sifting, all the dry ingredients were sifted into the bowl. This is what my mother would have done and I believe sifting helps mix baking powder, flour and sugar together. The recipe called for a slow mix of thirty seconds followed by a fast mix of three minutes. Because it looked like it needed more, the batter got two portions of the thirty second slow mix before the fast mix.

Fully mixed, the batter looked beautiful. It lacked the bright yellow of the box-cake but for smoothness and consistency, one could not ask for more. An aroma of good flour, sugar and real vanilla wafted from it as it was poured into the cake pan. The batter from the spatula tasted great.

The cake baked up in the same time it took to bake the box-cake and looked similar when taken from the oven. It smelled much better though, and tasted a world apart. This cake from the recipe was one that, as a child, I would have wanted to eat without frosting. In retrospect, this one should have gone unfrosted.

The frosting proved troublesome. A fudge frosting from the same book as the cake recipe was chosen but the recipe had to be doubled. Someone, I won’t point fingers here but I think it may have been the writer, must have measured something incorrectly. As a result, the frosting process took twice as long as it should have. Even then, only ten minutes were lost.

Conclusion: Sure, a box-cake comes together faster, but not much faster and it simply does not have the taste, texture or aroma of a cake baked from scratch.

Next up: a yellow cake from an old cookbook.

copyright 2005 Chromia Poetics