Stepping Out of My Cake Comfort Zone

I subscribe to the philosophy that one should always embrace Life to the fullest - - live with a passion, do and experience new and unfamiliar things; step outside your comfort zones. But recently, I’ve also learnt that this sometimes comes with a caveat - - or at least, where my cake comfort zone is concerned.

Here’s an announcement : up until a week ago, I have never ever used cake-mix before. You know, those colorful boxes of powdery stuff that line the supermarket shelves. It may be shocking, but it’s true - - it has simply never occurred to me to buy or use ready-mixes, be they muffin mixes, cake mixes or brownie mixes. I guess maybe it’s because I grew up watching my mum make everything from scratch - - no shortcuts. When I was very young, she even took wedding cake orders, and made elaborate, multi-tiered creations completely from scratch. Thus, it has never crossed my mind that there is any other way of making cakes.

Then, as with all things in life, there always comes a time when you are challenged - - pushed even - - to do what you have never done before; to go where you have never gone. And so, Betty Crocker’s cake-mix presented itself into my life.

The meeting was not by design - - at least, not by my design. It just happened. The elderly mother of one of my mum’s friends bought a box of Betty Crocker’s cake-mix from the supermarket, thinking there was a ready-made, ready-to-be-eaten cake inside. It was only after she got home that her daughter told her it was a cake-mix and the cake had to be baked first. And given that the daughter (my mum’s friend) was completely non-culinarily inclined, and had never baked anything before, she didn’t feel up to making the cake for her mother. That was where I came in. She knew I baked (from all the previous times my mum distributed my various baking endeavors to her friends), so she passed the cake-mix to my mum, and said simply that it was for me. Now, she never requested for me to make the cake for her, but courtesy alone required that I make the cake and “return” at least half of it to her (and her mother).

I remember well my first encounter with Ms Crocker’s mix. It was lying on the kitchen table when I walked into the kitchen. My eyes widened in astonishment. I picked up the box, turned it over and then back again, all the while gazing at it as if I had never seen a box of cake-mix in my life. With eyes round as saucers, I looked over at my mother - - I simply could not imagine she would have gone out of her way to buy a box of cake-mix. She told me the story, and suggested I find some time to make the cake. I suggested in turn that I would be happy to make a cake from scratch for her friend’s mother - - the elderly lady was obviously longing for some cake. My mum felt the old lady would probably be happier if she knew the cake was made from the cake-mix she bought.

And so, the seeds of my first cake-mix experience were sown.

I have to admit, I was apprehensive. For starters, I really didn’t like the look of those two words - - “artificially flavored” - - prominently emblazoned on the front of the box. Hmmm… Not my two favorite words in the English language, especially when it came to food.

I felt really uncomfortable. The overwhelming temptation was to cheat, and not use the cake-mix, and to make the cake from scratch. I swear, my palms were damp, my breathing had quickened. I was not at ease.

I knew that it was silly, but I really, really didn’t like those two words. Okay. So, I took a deep breath, and thought : this was like learning to swim - - you simply jumped in at the deep end and… swam. Nothing to it. As long as you didn’t think too much about it.

By now you must be thinking : what was the big deal? It was just making a cake from ready-prepared cake-mix. Nothing to it. But as with all steps (no matter how small) outside our comfort zones - - any comfort zone - - it felt, well, highly uncomfortable.

I can’t tell you how much I struggled with keeping to the instructions on the box. I was almost horrified that I was “ordered” to dump everything - - dry flour mix, eggs, fat, liquids - - into the mixer bowl all at the same time. My mind was screaming out : please, please, I want to add things in batches; I want to do things as I have always done them… cream the butter, add the eggs, and then only put in the liquids and flour in alternating batches. This was too much for me - - it was asking me to go against the grain of everything I had known and was comfortable with.

So I made a few concessions. I appeased my trembling sub-conscious by tweaking the “recipe” a little bit - - using butter instead of oil, and substituting two-fifths of the water called for with 1.5% milk.

After I had placed the cake into the oven, I realized what I truly didn’t like about my cake-mix experience. It was a neither-here-nor-there experience. It was, well, a little bit like a “quickie” in the bedroom (or any other location that pleases you, of course). But you know what I mean. Not terribly satisfying. Where was the foreplay? Oops! Sorry, I think this blog is supposed to carry a “G” rating. Ahem! So… where were we?

Oh yes, the cake-mix… Yes, I thought the entire experience was a little like being in no-man’s land. It was definitely not as quick, easy and simple as buying a ready-made cake from a cake shop or bakery, where you didn’t have to do any work at all, and got to enjoy a delicious piece of cake with minimal effort. Here, I still had to lug out the electric mixer, and there were almost as many things to wash as there normally would have been if I had made a cake from scratch. So, in terms of ease and amount of energy that had to be expended, it was not significantly easier than if I had not used the cake-mix.

And whilst the level of “work” involved was not significantly less, the satisfaction of baking a cake was vastly diminished. There just wasn’t that deep sense of fulfillment I usually got from touching, measuring out and mixing the flour, butter and eggs. The inner joy of creation was missing. And wasn’t that the whole point (or at least a large part of it) of baking?

I felt a little cheated of a cake-baking experience. And the worst part of it all - - there wasn’t even any cake-baking-in-the-oven aromas wafting from the oven throughout the time that the cake was in there! I guess artificial vanilla just didn’t come close to the real thing.

The urge to “set things right” was too great. I caved in. I decided to turn this plain-Jane cake into something a little bit more elaborate, albeit into a cake that seemed to think it was a pie - - an impromptu Boston Cream Pie. I had been meaning to make a Boston Cream Pie for the longest time. So what better time than now?

A quick flip through Rose Levy Beranbaum’s The Cake Bible revealed - - rather surprisingly - - no recipes for a pastry cream. So I ended up using a low-fat version adapted from a recipe in Steven Raichlen’s High-Flavor, Low-Fat Desserts, for the filling. And for the chocolate glaze on top, I decided to use Alice Medrich’s low-fat one again (the same one that I had used previously for my birthday cake). Only this time, I was too lazy to go look up the recipe again, and made it from memory. That wasn’t such a great idea as it turned out.

Anyway, this was the final cake…

Crunch time came when “our” half of the cake was served up as dessert after dinner.

I have to say, I don’t think I have ever seen such an instantaneous mass display of nose-scrunching and brow-creasing, followed by a simultaneous bout of “corners-of-the-mouth turning down” and “facial muscles stretching into strange expressions”, from the family!

My exacting panel of food critics was quick off the mark. Right off the bat, they pronounced that the flavors of the cake tasted “fake” and “weird”. The texture was also described as “really not very nice” - - and that was the most polite comment. And I had to concur. While the cake looked and felt somewhat dry and crumbly, it had this awful stick-to-the-back-of-your-teeth texture that everyone complained about. I guess this was what she meant when Betty Crocker hollered from the front of the cake mix box : “super moist”. But a truly moist cake didn’t have this stick-to-the-back-of-your-teeth mouth-feel to it. Moist didn’t (and shouldn’t) equal “damp”.

The “problem” was further compounded by the use of pastry cream - - which by its very nature was soft, luscious and creamy - - as the filling. It just made the whole cake experience too “wet” and sticky and messy.

There followed a quirky conversation with my mother. She commented that the pastry cream recipe was lousy and wrong. I said I actually liked the texture and the flavor of the cream (although I would probably fine-tune the overall taste a little bit more the next time I made it). I think my mum had a “misconceived” notion of what the filling was going to be like.

Earlier in the day, when she asked me what filling I was going to use in the cake, at that split moment I was suddenly stumped to think of the Mandarin translation for “pastry cream”. So, I said the next closest thing that came into my head : “custard”. And I think my mum’s concept of custard was very different from my concept of pastry cream. She was expecting a firmer custard-esque filling (a la our local kaya or pandan custards). I was making a soft, luscious pastry cream filling. So, in her mind, my filling was a complete failure - - it wasn’t a firm custard. At the dinner table, I tried to explain that it was a pastry cream. I still couldn’t come up with the Mandarin term for it, and so I simply said “pastry cream” in English. It didn’t mean much to her. I elaborated that it was the stuff that was often used as the filling in fresh fruit tarts. Her rejoinder then was that pastry cream wasn’t suitable as a cake filling. But I was of the opinion that pastry cream was great as cake filling - - but only in the right type of cake, such as roulades or in between layers of sponge or genoise, which had a dryer, flufflier and softer texture. It was not the pastry cream that was wrong, it was that this particular cake was wrong for the pastry cream. The stick-to-the-back-of-your-teeth (can you tell how much we don’t like this feeling?) texture just didn’t make a good pairing with the soft pastry cream.

As the discourse continued, I realized that I would probably be making another Boston Cream Pie in the future - - a ‘real’ Boston Cream Pie - - just so my mum could experience it.

To compound the entire wet, messy, sticky cake experience, my chocolate glaze was not as thickened as it should have been - - I shouldn’t have been lazy and should have gone and double-checked the recipe. So, all in all, it was just a gooey, sticky mess of a cake-eating session.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Now that I have had time to recover emotionally and psychologically from that cake-mix experience, what are my thoughts?

Well, I think if I had never made a cake prior to this experience, there would have been a chance that I would have ended up emotionally scarred for life, and may have had to spend countless hours in cake-therapy to help me get over the traumatic event. But seriously though, I think I am beginning to understand why some people have a fear of baking, or making a cake. I mean, if using a cake-mix - - supposedly a sort of “cake-making for dummies” - - can produce such unappetizing results, the thought that must go through the mind is that it will be way too difficult to even think of producing something delicious with a full-fledged, supposedly more complicated, recipe. But oh how wrong that line of thought is or can be. I personally think it is “easier” and infinitely more rewarding and deeply satisfying to play with a recipe and create something from scratch. Then again, I’m probably weird.

When all’s said and done, I have to say I’m not in any great hurry to repeat this cake-mix baking- and taste-experience. While I’m still all for the philosophy of running with the wind, living dangerously and embracing new and unexplored experiences in life, when it comes to cakes though, I’m scurrying right back to my pre-cake-mix comfort zone, and I’m staying there, thank you very much.

I’m planning (more like hoping to find the time) to bake another cake this weekend… a “real” cake… made from scratch… with “real” ingredients…

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