Well you probably pronounce “Peabody” like “pee-baw-dee” and “Hingham” like “hing-ham” and “Wareham” like “ware’m” So there!!! Harrumph.)
(Note: most of the above post will only make sense to we Massachusetts folk.) 
Sheesh, “we” Massachusetts folks have been making the most embarrassing typos lately. It must be due to myself’s lack of cake.
Equipoise I understand your consternation. If I saw that recipe as a “simple” recipe for cake, I too would run away screaming.
The simplest sponge cake has four ingredients (three if you use self-rising flour): eggs, sugar, flour, and baking powder.
That’s it. I’m not lying; that’s how I make my sponge.
From there, you can add some vanilla extract, lemon zest, a bit of salt, whatever. But the basic sponge is simple. There’s no need to further complicate it.
It’s the icing where you have fun.
I’m not slamming anyone who likes cake mix cake. I admit, sometimes I have a craving for crappy Duncan Hines yellow cake – it’s a bit of comfort food. It’s way too sweet for my tastes, and too chemically, but sometimes nothing but Duncan Hines will do.
I’m just saying it’s well within everyone’s capabilities to make from scratch, if they choose to do so. Despite quitguy154’s warnings. While I do agree that baking, in general, is not super easy if you don’t know what you’re doing (if you’ve ever tried making puff pastry from scratch, you know what I mean), but something like a sponge cake you absolutely cannot screw up unless you really, really try.
In the interest of facilitating entry into the world of scratch baking, I am indeed providing a recipe. But not for my Mama’s Devil’s Food cake with Boiled Fosting because that’s a family secret.
Anyway, the quickest and easiest place to start is a poundcake. It’s perfect at this time of year because you can serve it with all kinds of fruit. Or ice cream. Or fruit and ice cream, which would be my preference. Here’s my favorite pound cake recipe:
1 cup vanilla yogurt
1 cup butter, softened
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 teaspoon lemon juice
3 eggs, lightly beaten
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon lemon zest
2 cups granulated sugar
2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
Preheat oven to 325° F. Prepare a large loaf pan with a generous coat of butter and a light dusting of flour.
Place all of the wet ingredients into a large mixing bowl. Blend using an electric mixer at low speed to mix all of the ingredients together. Add the dry ingredients one by one, mixing on low/medium speed to fully blend into the wet mixture. Be sure to add the flour slowly to avoid creating a flour storm. Once the flour is added, mix on medium speed only until it’s well incorporated into the batter.
Pour the batter into the prepared loaf pan. Bake at 325° for 55-60 minutes or until a toothpick inserted into the center of the cake comes out clean.
Cool the cake in the pan, on a rack, for 15-20 minutes before removing or slicing.
It’s rich, it’s moist, it’s yummy, and if it were any easier to make, it’d be a cake from a mix. 
Actually, it’s not any more expensive. On the aggregate it’s less expensive as I don’t have to pay extra for specialty mixes of any kind, cake, biscuit or otherwise. I can get several cakes from a sack of flour that at times costs no more than a cheap cake mix. True, buttermilk is a special item that I do not keep around the house, but when someone wants chocolate cake, it’s no more trouble to pick up a pint of buttermilk than it is to pick up a cake mix and can of frosting at the grocery. In fact, I’ve made the cake with regular milk and while it’s not as moist, it’s still delicious.
Think about it a moment, while you may not be adding it, your out of the box cake mix has salt and soda in it too. It’s got to have (a) leavening agent(s) to rise.
The reason for my post was because several people commented that it was too time consuming to bake from scratch and another some one further up asked for recipes. That particular recipe is no more difficult or time consuming than a box cake mix. Indeed any 8-10 year old that can make a box cake, can make this cake. There is nothing different about the process other than rather than ripping the lid off a box adn throwing it away as opposed to opening the pour spout on the salt and a few other reusable containers.
My point is that contrary to the posts insisting they’ve never had a scratch cake because it would take to much time, is to point out that it is does not necessarily have to be significantly more time consuming. Sure there are complicated involved cake recipes, but if you want to try a scratch cake, it doesn’t have to be in intimidating process. A box cake takes 5 minutes or so to throw together and 30-35 minutes to bake, the scratch choc cake takes 5-7 minutes to throw together and 30-35 minutes to bake. The frosting takes less than five minutes and it’s easily accomplished during the 30 minute baking time.
I grew up in a home where cake mixes where how cake was made, so I’m familiar with how long it takes. In fact if I am making cake for cupcakes to take to the school or some such I use a mix now and then too. It’s convenient. But it isn’t accurate so say that scratch cakes take significantly longer, they don’t have too. It takes about 8 more ingredients that all come from the same pantry as the cake mix. Maybe folks don’t want to bother, but it is not significantly more time consuming.
See, Abby, here’s the problem from a non-baker’s perspective (bearing in mind that I’m actually a baker.) Here in New York, If I go out and by a chocolate cake mix, that’ll probably run me about $1.29, plus I’ll need eggs and vegetable oil - things I might well use even if I never bake again. But to make the scratch cake, I have to buy cocoa ($3.50 or so a box), sweetened condensed milk (at least $1.50 a can), buttermilk (about 2.00 a quart), and baking soda (.69 a box) - all things that, as a non-baker, I’d be unlikely to need for a very long time, if ever. So which is cheaper? If you bake regularly, the scratch recipe - but only if you bake regularly. If you don’t, and you otherwise would never buy those ingredients, it’s not. I’m also highly doubtful that, the first time, a scratch cake will take anywhere near 5-7 minutes - more likely two-four times longer for the novice. So long as the first time is longer, more expensive, and less convenient than a mix, there will never be a first time for most people - or if there’s a first, there won’t be a second.
Me too.
I don’t know where he gets this stuff.
AND…not that there is anything wrong with cake mixes but I usually go the from scratch route myself just because I have the ingredients on hand. I can see how buying that stuff if you don’t plan on using it often could sway one to buy a boxed mix though.
To each his own.
I’m with you. My kitchen is not stocked at all. I am not a cook. I taught myself, and I only cook basic foods. I don’t even make cake from mixes, because that would require buying eggs and oil. If I want cake it’s much easier and cheaper to get a store-made one. Especially because I tend to overanalyze directions. (A dash? How much is that? How do I know if I put in too much or too little? Aaaaargh!)
I think we are seeing a basic divide between those of us who pretty much grew up cooking (either out of self-defense – we had to eat and were too poor to order in or eat out all the time – or because Mom cooked and instilled it into us) and those who didn’t.
Take the list of ingredients for that chocolate cake. Almost all of them (flour, granulated sugar, soda, salt, cocoa, oil, vanilla, eggs, butter, powdered sugar) fall into the category of ‘staples’ in my household. Meaning, if I ran out of any of them, I’d automatically restock the next shopping trip, whether or not I intended to make a cake in the near future.
That leaves only buttermilk and condensed milk as ‘exotic’ ingredients.
I never buy buttermilk. OTOH, I know that, chemically speaking, the buttermilk does two things in the recipe: provides water AND an acid to interact with the soda to leaven the cake. So instead of buying buttermilk, I’d just take a hair under a cup of regular milk and stir in about a Tablespoon of white vinegar and proceed merrily along. (Yes, there will be slight difference in the taste between my version and the one with the real buttermilk, but A) it will be very slight and B) both versions will taste yummy though different.)
As for the condensed milk…eh, condensed milk is nothing but milk plus extra sugar that has been boiled down. Just use regular milk - again, you’ll lose some extra yumminess, but the end result will still be miles above non-homemade. (You can forget about adding in the extra sugar: since you’re putting in up to a pound of sugar into the frosting anyway, the missing few tablespoons don’t matter.)
The problem for non-regular cooks, of course, is that they don’t know what can be substituted for what, without creating disastrous results. This isn’t their fault, and I’m not some kind of genius who intuited this out of thin air – much of this I learned beside my mother, the rest I picked up over the years, and finally, I happen to know that most basic cookbooks (like the Betty Crocker one with the red plaid covers) include tables of substitutions in them, just waiting to be consulted. Run out of baker’s chocolate? No prob: cocoa + butter will see you through.
And, of course, the non-habitual-cooks-from-scratch don’t have that pantry of ‘staples’ waiting at hand. Agreed, it costs quite a bit to get your kitchen pantry fille to begin with, but once you do, you really can save an amazing amount of money.
What’s better, though, is having the ingredients separately gives you a zillion options. Using various subsets of the staple items listed above, (plus another two or three, like yeast) you can make anything from a coating for fried chicken to rolls to doughnuts to bagels to bread to pretzels to biscuits to waffles to cakes to quickbreads to cracker to noodles to… on and on and on. Having a box of Duncan Hines Chocolate cake mix enables you to make a chocolate cake (and possibly cupcakes) but if what you want to do is fry up some chicken, you are sol.
And after saying all that, I say if you A) Don’t enjoy cooking and B) aren’t forced to do it out of economic necessity then you absolutely shouldn’t feel guilty or ‘inferior’ or anything silly like that. We all have only so many hours in the day, and we all get to spend them according to our tastes and situation.
If you are spending the extra few minutes you save by not cooking from scratch on playing peek-a-boo with your daughter or reading a few pages of that great new book or just vegging out to destress – I say those are at least equally valid and worthy choices to make. It’s just that some of us LIKE cooking from scratch, or at least, eating what we cook from scratch.
I realize I’m coming in late to the thread, but I can’t read the whole thing without getting hungry.
So my family, from Georgia, would call that “chocolate cake.” If you wanted the cake itself to be chocolate, you’d call it “devil’s food.” Likewise, white cake was called “angel food.”
I bet there’s some semi-obscure baker’s distinction between devil’s food and chocolate cake, but it would be lost on me. I never liked anything other than chocolate cake (yellow cake with chocolate frosting) anyway.
I want you people to know that this discussion finally forced me to make a yellow cake with chocolate icing yesterday. And while yellowcake may be used in weapons of mass destruction, yellow cake is a weapon of @ss inflation, dammit.
I made it from scratch, and the recipe called for butter, eggs, sugar, flour, baking powder, and salt, plus cocoa and powdered sugar (and more butter) for the icing. All of which I generally have on hand anyway. It isn’t the best yellow cake I’ve ever tasted, but it’s very good, and only took about ten minutes to mix up, plus maybe five minutes more for the icing. Yummy.
Surely:
1 - white cake mix
3/4 C. - veg. oil
4 - eggs
1 3 oz. pkg. - lemon jello
1/2 C. - water
1/2 C. - lemon juice
Mix the lemon juice and the water and set to boiling. For a more tart cake, you can use more lemon juice – I usually use 3/4 cup juice and 1/4 cup water because I like my lemon cake tart. Whatever proportions of juice to water you use, though, it needs to equal one cup. Once it’s boiling mix in the jello and stir until it’s all dissolved. Let sit until cooled, but not set.
Stir cake mix and oil together in large mixing bowl. Add eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addition. Add the cooled jello and mix well.
Pour batter into oiled and floured (or just use Pam – that’s what I do nowadays) ring pan. At least I always use a ring pan. You could use a bundt pan, which would be prettier. But we didn’t own a bundt pan when I was growing up, so I always use a ring pan because that’s how it’s supposed to look. Bake at 350 for 35 to 40 minutes. Let cool before removing from pan.
Once cake is completely cooled, make a powdered sugar glaze to trickle over the top. I don’t measure for the glaze: just put some powdered sugar in a bowl and whisk in enough lemon juice to make a medium thin glaze.
Enjoy!
Thankyouthankyouthankyou! I am making this tonight.
Jess, that lemon cake sounds fantastic - I’m going to try it asap.
I’m not a cook. My whole life my Mom tried to teach me to ccok, and she wasn’t a very good teacher. I follow the directions explicitly. I don’t make lots of different things.
And, yeah, I can buy all that, but why? I don’t eat cake often(maybe on my birthday, and Doomtrain’s), so why have all these ingredients sitting around my kitchen, just in case? They take up shelf space, and how do I know if/when they go bad? It’s just not worth the hassle.
My pleasure, rockle – let me know how you like it (you too, missbunny). I haven’t made it in ages, myself. My husband’s birthday is coming up – maybe I’ll ask him if he fancies a lemon cake for that.
Awesome. My husband at half of it before I even had a chance to make the glaze.
Any white cake would be called angel food? That I find very surprising. Generally, angel food refers only to a very particular subspecies of white cake - one that’s mostly air, because it relies on beaten egg whites for most of its leavening and structure. A typical recipe will call for about a dozen egg whites, absolutely no fat (the presence of almost any amount of fat will make the beaten egg whites collapse), and very little flour. It’s usually baked in tube pan and comes out looking like this. Note that you can add cocoa powder to an angel food and have a chocolate angel food - a variation noted in the recipe link.
Other white cakes look and act just like yellow cakes - in other words, they’re butter cakes. A typical example is Betty Crocker’s Silver White Cake. The recipe is almost identical to that for a yellow cake, only it calls for 5 egg whites in place of 2 whole eggs (and plain shortening instead of butter/margarine, but that’s a trivial distinction and really just for color).
I could make a cake from scratch (I’ve done it before, in school and with my mom), but I make maybe one cake a year.
As mentioned above, I do not want to spend the money to stock up on the “staple” ingredients involved (we currently have roughly half of them in the pantry to aid in the creation of my husband’s famous banana bread, but the remainder would cost a bit too much for stuff that would eventually be thrown out). More importantly, though, the whole sifting thing would present a significant challenge. I have no desire to spend even a small amount of money on a tool that I’ve never needed in the ten years I’ve been out of my mom’s house. And then I’d have to find storage space for it, and be able to find it again when I did actually need it!
Not now, but if the Republicans pass their torte reform. . . .
Daniel