Blue-Eyed Baker: Boxed Mixes and Canned Icing

As you all know I've been home this past week and the original plan was to bake a couple things while I'm here.  That actually hasn't happened.  I'm going to bake a cake for Mother's Day that will be just lovely but other than that I haven't made anything except for some cupcakes that came out of a box but to me those don't really count.

I haven't used a boxed cake mix in about a year, Wednesday night was the first time since I discovered my love for baking from scratch.  In the past I've made my famed Irish Carbomb cupcakes and people have said "Did you make these from scratch?" and I very pompously replied "Of course I made them from scratch.  Who wants to use a boxed mix?".  I'm very proud of my from scratch creations even if they're recipes from other people, I have yet to make up my own recipe or even drastically change a recipe I've found on the internet. We'll get there someday.

So on Wednesday, my sister, Julia, text me asking if I would bake cupcakes for school the next day.  At first  I said no because I was going out with a friend later and I didn't want to be up late baking.  Then she said they're for Josh Seader, who's a guy that I graduated High School with, he was always really nice and Senior year we had like every class together so she guilted me into making them.  I still knew I wasn't in the mood to bake anything from scratch and I probably wasn't going to have all of the ingredients anyway so, much to my chagrin, I purchased a boxed mix and some canned icing.

It was your classic yellow cake and chocolate icing.  As I was making them, 3 eggs, 1/3 cup oil, 1 cup of water, yuck, I thought to myself that this is really gross and I would have rather taken the time to make something from scratch.  The icing was Duncan Hines Whipped and if I ever had to endorse a pre-made product that would probably be the one.  It wasn't bad.  I still wasn't happy with the overall product but I'm sure the kids in Julia's class could care less.  They're getting free cupcakes at school they most likely do not care that I went through a lot of emotional pain making those boxed monstrosities.  At this point you can probably tell that I really dislike using boxed mixes.

They didn't look half bad,

I used my favorite cupcake icing technique to ease the pain.

I'd also like to express my disdain at the glut of wedding cake recipes online that masquerade as "professional" or "homemade" recipes but utilize a boxed mix.  Now these recipes add other things to the boxed stuff but if you're going to use the boxed crap don't say that it's homemade or that you're a professional.

Okay, my rant is over.  Happy Friday!