In my office cake is the standard treat whenever it’s à coworkers birthday. Usually three or so people with birthdays close together buy à few cakes and treat the other 50 people in the departement. We end up having cake get togethers twice à month. But most of the cake isn’t the multilayered kind with cream , but plain vlaai: à cake bottom with a plain fruity jelly topping.
The point of packaged mixes is that they’re faster and easier than making a cake from scratch.
I’m not sure how to answer this. “Cake” in the sense that everyone here (including me) understands you to mean: the modern big sweet leavened fluffy buttery eggy confection, often layered and usually frosted. That sort doesn’t really exist on my “planet.” But—
While researching recipes I became interested in recreating antiquarian breads of Planet Earth. What I found is many types of baked goods in ancient and mediæval times were called “cakes” (plural), few of which would be called “cake” today. They resembled more cookies or biscuits or thick flatbreads. The main thing they had in common was a round shape and no frosting. They weren’t necessarily sweetened at all, but if they were it was with honey or fruit. The dog found in Pompeii had a flat Roman raisin cake in his mouth.
When I carried out a project to recreate an ancient Irish recipe for oatcake, using oatmeal (ground into a coarse flour), butter, and honey, it was a flat disk about as wide as your hand and half an inch high. Very dense and chewy. When I first tasted it, I was all “my God, it tastes exactly like a plain granola bar.”
When I worked on recreating recipes for ancient Eastern Mediterranean “barley cakes,” they turned out similar to cookies—except not sweetened (unless they were “honey cakes”). That was poor people’s bread in ancient times. So crumbly it couldn’t be buttered or sliced or made into sandwiches. People ate it by dropping it into their soup bowl like we do with crackers. Or I guess they munched it like a cookie. “Cookie” is simply Dutch for ‘little cake’, anyway.
So to make a long story short, no to “cake” and yes to “cakes.”
I like to doctor up boxed mixes. Not quite from scratch, but there’s still some creativity and work involved.
There’s only one cake I routinely make from scratch, and that only because it’s a dead simple recipe that I learned as a child and it’s too simple to forget.
If I want a whole cake for a birthday or occasion, I make it from scratch because I enjoy the baking process.
If I want a piece of cake with no leftovers, I go to Rick’s.
Men have been killed for less.
That’s no surprise. Everybody comes to Rick’s.
Come to think of it, I was thinking of making a Sicilian cassata, which I haven’t made in ages. It starts with a pound cake, which I would always bake from scratch. So I guess I’ll sign up for the “scratch” contingent.
My mom’s (grandmother’s actually) chocolate cake recipe is so mind-numbingly easy to make and so damn good that I make cake from scratch. Cake mixes just don’t even come close. I’ve had friends trying to steal the recipe from me for years, but I like to keep it secret just to annoy them. I don’t feel that it’s particularly time-consuming; it’s just tossing a few more ingredients into the bowl compared to cake mixes, nothing complicated.
In fact, I’ll bake pretty much any dessert we are likely to have. I’m not a great cake decorator, but most of the time people don’t care and it’s yummy. I love baking.
Bah. We need checkboxes, not radio buttons.
On the rare occasion that I allow myself to indulge in cake, I either get it from a mom n pop sweet shop up the street, or a make it from scratch. Indulging is pretty rare to start with, so I couldn’t tell you which is more frequent.
I usually make it from scratch. My scratch cakes taste yummy , but they aren’t, well, beautiful and professional-looking frosted creatures. Someday I’ll learn to decorate them so they don’t look like they were made by a ten-year-old. When I want a pretty cake, I go to a local mom-and-pop bakery.
I learned to bake (desserts) before I learned to cook (dinner), which mightily amused my first girlfriend. My mom, years before, had grown tired of cooking all the time and told us that if we wanted dessert, we could dang well make it ourselves, so I did.
For a frosted cake I usually use a mix, or at least start with a mix. I make a red velvet cake from scratch every Christmas, and I make things like pound cakes and coffee cakes from scratch.
I make a yummy blueberry coffee cake, but I can’t serve it to people because I can never get it out of the pan in one piece. The family doesn’t mind eating reconstructed cake, though.
I love cake. Sometimes I bake my own, but I usually sit up and think, “I want cake!” so off to the store I go. I would love to get it from a bakery, but I haven’t lived anywhere with a real bakery since 1978. My brother would bring my daughter’s birthday cakes down to me from Chicago so that she could have nice cake.
Oh, no!
Oh, no
No, no
Oh NO!!
I love to bake. I’m not sure I’ve ever used a mix. I recently took my first cake decorating class, so I may very well bake a fancy layer cake this weekend for no reason other than I want to.
I don’t see it. Mixing a cake from scratch takes a couple of minutes and is no more difficult than following the instructions on a packet of mix.
The time consuming part is lining the baking tin, or laying out the muffin cases, or waiting for the oven to preheat, which is the same whether it’s mixed or scratch.
I usually make it, and from scratch. Although I only do it for special occasions because I don’t need all the extra cake in my diet.
This weekend my sister-in-law wanted a Mexcian-themed birthday party so I made tres leches cake. It was muy delicioso!
I usually make it from scratch for someone’s birthday, including my own. I like cake mix cake, but it doesn’t usually occur to me to use it unless it’s cupcakes for the kids - for them, getting cake from a box is a treat (any cake is a treat, but something “normal” like cake from a box is like Christmas to them).
I generally make my own birthday cake because if I don’t and my mom’s visiting, she’ll come over and insist she’s going to make my “favorite.” Since my favorite cake is a chocolate lava cake, her version of making my favorite is code for, “I’m going to make the cake I want; hopefully you’ll like it.” Instead of arguing about it, I usually just tell her what I’m going to make. If she insists on making her cake, I usually make my own anyway because, dammit, I don’t eat cake often. When I do, I’m eating the one I want!
We have a really good bakery here in Pittsburgh. I could bake a cake, given cake mix or the proper ingredients (and as long as it doesn’t require a stand mixer, which we don’t have). But I couldn’t decorate one, and the frosting is the part I really like.
I try not to keep sweets around the house, in general. If they’re not there, my laziness can work on my side. My laziness is one of the few forces in the universe that can successfully resist my food cravings. So, most of the time, there are no cakes or cookies in Casa Neville.