Reviewing for You: Pillsbury Purely Simple White Cake and Cupcake Mix

Product: Pillsbury Purely Simply White Cake and Cupcake Mix.  I'll admit, I've been using this product for the last 6 months or so, as an emergency cake mix to keep in my cabinets.  For when your neighbor brings home a new baby and you need to bring something over as a welcome home gift.  Or your boss tells you about a presentation you're giving for 2 hours the day before you give it (true story).  We've been looking for that go-to cake mix for awhile, and figured this one was worth a shot.  Aldi's white cake mix is often a stand in for this one, as it has a really good taste to it, but it still has lots of chemicals in it.

Claim to Fame: It's right there on the box above: Pillsbury claims this is an all natural cake.  No preservatives, no colors, nothing artificial about it.  The ingredient list shows this to be pretty accurate, at least as far as a major food company is concerned:

Furthermore, all the ingredients you add are things you would naturally keep in your house 100 years ago.  That's always my test: if I can buy it on the Oregon Trail, then it's a natural product in my book.

If we're going by the Oregon Trail rule of thumb, a few of the ingredients are a bit of a stretch.  I'm sure the early pioneers did not carry Calcium Phosphate or Xanthan Gum.  But in general, I'm impressed that their list of ingredients contains only things I know and can pronounce.  As could the Oregon Trail settlers.  I think.

Price: $ ($0 - $10) I will say, these box mixes run on the expensive side.  The Aldi box mix I mentioned above runs me $0.99 every time I throw one in my cart.  Each of these boxes have been running me in the $3 - $3.50 range, depending on where I find them.  Although, since this is a newer product right now, a lot of these boxes also come with a $1 off coupon, which helps cut down on the costs a little.  Still, you're paying at minimum double the cost of a generic cake box mix.  Xanthan gum ain't cheap, folks.

Testing it Out: To truly test this out, I figured I'd make a cake for some friends, feed it to them, and see if they noticed it was a box mix.  The old blind taste test is the only real way to gauge the quality of a product.  Baking the mix was as easy as any other mix you would typically find.  Throw the mix into the bowl, cream the butter, and then add the milk and eggs.  I will say that by the time the batter was ready to go into the pan it was very thick, almost the consistency of a pudding.  I had my concerns about that, but they were ill formed.

The cakes baked up beautifully, no major issues.  Once cooled and iced, you would never know if this was a cake I slaved over for awhile, or just another box mix I picked up at the store.  Only the unwilling subjects of my test would know what was going on.

So I brought the cake to my friends, told them I baked it because they were amazing (partial lie), and sat back and waited while they ate it.  The praise was universal:

"This cake is really good."

"The cake is really moist this time!"

"Wow, the flavor of this cake is great!"

To be fair, I was prodding them for these answers, so maybe they praised it a little higher than they normally would have because I was the baker.  But no one threw out their piece of cake either, I can promise you that.  Like Godzilla on an unsuspecting Japanese town, that cake was flattened in a matter of minutes.

When I told everyone they had just eaten a box mix they were pleasantly surprised.  As my one friend noticed, "Box mixes usually have a certain taste to them.  You can just tell they're box mixes.  This one didn't have that taste."  This girl probably would've rocked it on the Oregon Trail.  She's the kind of person you put in your wagon with you.

The Results: The results were very strong for me and for Pillsbury.  The cake mix seemed to hold pretty true to their all natural ingredients claim, and it was as easy to bake as any other box mix.  The unsuspecting cake judges loved the cake's taste, and once I let it slip that it was a box mix they all agreed it was a mix they'd be willing to purchase themselves.

Final Verdict: As I said at the beginning of this post, I've kept this mix in my cabinet for the past 5 months or so.  That isn't a fluke.  It's worked wonders for me in a pinch, and I continue to have a spare box or two up there in case of an emergency.

Rating: **** 1/2 out of *****: This would have received a perfect 5/5 from me, but I had to take a half point off for the price.  This mix can be costly.  Sure it's all natural, but I also know flour and sugar are not expensive ingredients, Pillsbury.  But if you find a coupon, go buy this.  You won't be disappointed!

Star Wars Cake

It's been a long time since we blogged anything, so today's a good day to change that! :)  Let's catch everyone up to date with what's been going on in our baking world.

First, we've had a lot of fun this past month creating some fun projects for customers.  We had a request for a birthday cake that couldn't have ANY chocolate in it because they had given chocolate up for Lent (a cake without chocolate...such a travesty) and we had two King Cake orders for Mardi Gras this year.  Earlier this year we got to plan and create a Disney Princess cake for a preschool-aged birthday party.  And we also set up a Twitter account where we tweet about how much we're craving brownies (who doesn't crave brownies??).  You should go follow us, especially if you love to see what we're up to!

I think we're all caught up now!  So let's move on to the main event: last weekend's cake!

We love Star Wars.  We are geeky bakers and we have no problem admitting it.  We saw Star Wars several times in theaters over the Christmas season.  Han Solo is our space crush.  If you don't at least mildly tolerate Star Wars, this blog post probably isn't for you.

So when someone gave us the task of creating a Star Wars themed cake, well....we couldn't help but dive into this idea with both feet.  Again, please read the paragraph above: We love Star Wars.

The challenge became, though, what do you put on a Star Wars cake?  There are so many iconic moments, characters, and scenes from that movie, it's hard to pick just one and turn it into a cake you love.  We finally settled on an idea that seemed to be simple enough to execute, with a pretty high return on the Awesome Scale if we managed to successfully pull it off: We were going to build the Millennium Falcon.

To build the Falcon the right way, we would have to use some skills we don't always bring out for most of our cakes.  First off, we were going to have to build the ship out of compressed Rice Krispie treats, to maintain a better height to weight ratio.  For long time readers of this blog, you may remember we first used Rice Krispie treats in this cake we made last year, but it's not a technique we normally use.  And for this cake, it would be our biggest krispie creation ever!

Millennium Falcon supplies all ready to go!

Working with Rice Krispie treats (hereafter dubbed RKT because we're lazy) is not always the easiest.  If they're not compressed properly they tend to flake off at the worst possible moments.  It also takes a lot of work to smooth the surface in preparation for the fondant you're going to be layering over all of it.  And, of course, it's hard not to want to just eat them all! (RKT are a weakness for us).

Dowel rods became a life savor for us when creating this.

In the end, though, we managed to get a shape we were fairly happy with.  Dowel rods helped to secure the front of the ship while we prepared it with both icing and fondant.  It took the strain of the weight so that no random parts of the ship fell off.

Also, can we just say, in general, before a cake is done, they are some of the ugliest things we've ever seen.  They're lumpy and oddly shaped, and sometimes you put a piece of cake together and just think, how in the heck is this even going to come together into something that even resembles the end result we're trying to achieve.  Yet somehow, miraculously, it almost always does come together in the end.  Those little end details and piping work usually manage to take a cake from blah to beautiful.

Look at how awkward this is, halfway through the creating process.  It's going to look a lot better than that by the time it's done.

So one of the reasons we really liked the idea of this cake is how much piping work it required -- we love a good piping challenge.  This one was no small task, either.  The piping all over the ship is what transformed this RKT from odd blob to the ship that made the Kessel run in less than 12 parsecs.  It gives the cake depth and details in a details and symmetrical way that we adore.  We would honestly make this cake every day if we could!

Base cake and icing reporting for duty!

After the ship was done, it was a pretty easy assembly of the base cake with the Star Wars logo running along side of it, some small stars detailed on, and then the placement of the completed Millennium Falcon on top.  Over and done with.

Check it out, and tell us what you think:

So there you have it!  Our first (of hopefully many) Star Wars cakes that we were able to create!  It was definitely a hit when we delivered it, so we can't wait for another Star Wars cake request to come along.

As a reminder to everyone who is planning out Easter dinner already, make sure you get your order in with us for the holidays.  Cakes, pies, cheesecakes, we've got you covered!  Help support small business and contact us today!

We'll be back soon with another update or 12.  As always, for more frequent updates on all the delicious goodies we're baking up, make sure to follow us on social media.  We promise looking at photos is completely healthy for you!

See you soon!

New Menu Item

We love January.  Is that weird??  Most Western PA folks hate January, because it means bitter cold and snow, and not the magical Christmas snow.  We get that.  January snow is worse than December snow.

But we love January.  It's usually a slower time of the year for us (yay diets that last until Valentine's Day!!) so it gives us time to recharge after the holiday rush and gear up for a new year.

This year, we decided to shake things up a little too.

Every January we try to focus on adding something new to our menu.  We weed out what doesn't work, and add some new flavors and ideas to inject some new creativity into our brand.  Last year we added cheesecakes to our menu.  The year before, spritz cookies.  It's a revolving door of ideas.

This year it wasn't a new menu item, per se, but a new flavor.  Somehow in all of our baking and flavoring love, we didn't really have anything caramel flavored on our menu, except for our bacon toffee cheesecake.  So we decided to change that.

Introducing: Our Salted Caramel Cupcake!

This thing is a sight to behold!  It's a rich butter cake with caramel icing on top (we make the caramel from scratch, too, just to make it that much better) and topped with sea salt.  It's light and delicious, and we don't know how it took us until this long to add this to our menu.  No seriously, we don't.

We had some taste testers this weekend take this cupcake for a test drive, and all of them came back with thumbs waaaaaaaay up!  So if you'd like to get in on the fun, order some of these for yourself today.  Trust us, you'll wonder where this has been your entire life.