Mix Versus Scratch

There is a huge controversy going on right now -and it's not what baby box Sussex will be named. It involves cakes mixes versus the all natural scratch cakes. Both have merits.Both have their detractions. What's a home baker to do?

Scratch cakes have been around since Roman times when special breads were baked with honey, butter and eggs. The18th, 19th and the first thirty years of the 20th Century saw housewives mixing ingredients such as eggs, flour, sugar  and butter into crude pans and baking them. They were eaten no matter how they turned out. The 1930's saw the birth of cake mix and it took twenty years for it to be a household staple.Now there's an internet controversy about which is better. Many home bakers- especially moms of young children - prefer using scratch recipes. The ingredients are natural plus they can change the recipe to suit gluten and allergy problems.One of the pluses of the internet age is that there are tons of scratch cake recipes from basic chocolate and vanilla to rum and strawberry flavors.Thanks to grocery stores , Amazon and King George's Flour ,all ingredients such as corn starch and vanilla pods can be found. Yet , despite  all this are scratch cakes better? Is the taste better? What about the crumb?

I baked both scratch and mix cakes during my lamb experiment.What produced a better bite? The box mixes, of course. As with scratch ones I could alter the recipe, getting rid of the vegetable oil, adding double the amount of eggs along with including a cup of cold water. The crumb was dense and moist, perfect for the lamb cake and a good foil for the super sweet icing that would frost the lamb.The baked vegan lamb was not that great tastewise. The recipe was from Vegan Cooking In Colorado which was taken from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over The World and modified. (I bought the cupcake book and will be experimenting with its recipes soon). To me there was too much almond extract - four teaspoons - that gave the cake a sickly sweet taste. The crumb was so delicate that the lamb's head fell off. Maybe the recipe would have worked  for cupcakes or layer cakes. The color was very pale too. There was no richness there. The mix cakes - all Duncan Hines blended with Dream Whip had this , possibly because of the addition of Dream Whip. I won't rule out homemade cakes yet when I want to impress  - then it's a Duncan Hines cake mix all the way.

What's the best recipe to use when making a cake? That's really up to the home baker. What works for one baker may not work for the other.As with cooking the answers lies with experimenting.