This video is sponsored by Skillshare.
Boxed cake mixes have characteristics that we simply cannot recreate here in the home
kitchen using conventional ingredients. Why is that the case? And how does it effect the
finished baked results? Well, we're gonna do an experiment where we bake the same cake
two ways; we're gonna talk to a scientist about the surprisingly sophisticated contents
of this box; and we'll interrogate the philosophical questions raised by all of this, including:
What's the point of making anything from scratch?
Field trip to the Mill Hill Community Arts Center in Macon, Georgia, where the Mill Hill
Bakers Collective is run by my friend Adriana Horton. It's a low-cost shared kitchen space
for indie bakers who all have their own respective businesses. Adrianna's business is the Oh
Honey Baking Company, and she makes my favorite cake, which is a cookies and cream cake. First
she's gonna make it from her favorite box mix.
"One chocolate and one vanilla to make an Oreo cake. Duncan is my main squeeze. It's
just the most consistent, and it tastes less like chemicals."
You just mix in some eggs, water and oil.
"I really like to whip my batter. A lot of people say that you can over-mix."
But this whipping stage — which the instructions tell you to do — is absolutely key, especially
for boxed mixes. That's according to Dr. Rebecca Miller-Regan, a professor of bakery science
at Kansas State University.
"In order to get a cake to rise and to have a nice crumb grain, it's critical to get air
into that batter during mixing; that's the only place it comes from. A lot of people
think that the chemical leavening — like your baking powder, or baking soda — makes
the air bubbles. It doesn't."
Dr. Miller says this chemical reaction merely makes CO2, which inflates existing air bubbles.
When you bake a cake from scratch, there's often a stage called "creaming," where you
beat solid fat to create air bubbles within it. But with a box, the solid fat — shortening,
in this case — is already mixed in there. So there can be no creaming stage. The contents
of the box have been formulated to be whipped in their entirety without going tough the
way that, potentially, a cake batter that you made from scratch could go tough if you
over-mix it.
If your boxed cakes aren't coming out well, Dr. Miller suspects it's because you're not
following the instructions that tell you to beat the batter for a good two minutes after
you get everything incorporated.
"With continued mixing, it breaks the bubbles that are incorporated into smaller-sized bubbles.
So you get more bubbles that are smaller in size that make a nice, fine, uniform grain
in you final cake."
"These are the mix cakes, and you can really see the difference, because the mix cakes
are so smooth and perfect, and the scratch cakes have bubbles, and more like a crust,
and cracks on top of them."
But how do they taste after we get them all decorated? Well, you can see how soft the
box cake is. And it tastes very sweet — too sweet, to my taste.
Here's the scratch cake.
"It's not as fluffy, but it has more of a body to it."
I would go so far as to call the chocolate version of Adriana's scratch cake clearly
superior to the chocolate boxed cake. It's just fudgier, richer more substantial.
"But the softness of the white cake from the mix is just, like, incomparable."
"Boxed cake is very sweet. But the soft consistency is definitely a win for science, because you
can't recreate that with a scratch cake at all. It's just impossible."
And why can't you? Well, Dr. Miller says it comes down to three big factors: the emulsifiers
that are in this box, the fats that are in this box and specifically how they're integrated
into the rest of the mixture, and then there's the kind of flour. We'll start with the first
thing — the emulsifiers.
An emulsifier is any ingredient that allows two or more liquids two mix together and stay
mixed together, even if they don't want to. The big example would be oil and water. They
kinda reject each other on a chemical level. I can smush them together with brute force,
but, this mixture is unstable. The water and fat will eventually separate. Now, if I mix
in an egg yoke, I can get a smooth and stable emulsion. Egg yokes contain lecithin, a molecule
that can join up with water on one end and with fat on the other end, and there — it's
the bond between the two warring camps.
The high-tech emulsifiers that are in this box allow the batter to hold onto more water
and oil than it normally could. That'll get you a more moist texture. And crucially, the
emulsifiers allow the batter to hold onto more bubbles that would otherwise just pop.
"So in your commercial cake mix, it has the right type of emulsifiers that help the air
to be — the air is gonna be trapped, but it helps hold the air bubbles in the aqueous
or water phase of the batter. But when you're making it at home, you don't have those specific
type of emulsifiers available."
We do have some options in here. For example, egg yokes. That's why recipes for particularly
rich and moist cakes often call for extra egg yokes. It's for the emulsifiers they have.
Dr. Miller says you can also look for shortening that has some of these more high-tech emulsifiers
in it.
"Not to advertise for Crisco, but that's what we have here. And it will say on there that
it has mono- and diglycerides in it. Those are an emulsifier. So it works well, because
it helps to stabilize and get more air whipped into the shortening phase."
And indeed, we see mono- and diglycerides mentioned here on the Duncan Hines box. There's
other emulsifiers you can buy, like soy lecithin. But what are the odds that you're gonna come
up with a better formula than all of the highly paid, highly educated food scientists that
they have working at Conagra, doing thousands and thousands and thousands of experiments
to nail the perfect formula that gets you the perfectly reliable cake every single time?
Science: It's like magic that works.
Now let's talk about the fats in here. Cakes often have a mixture of solid and liquid fats.
In this case, the box tells us to add our own veg oil. But the solid fat, shortening,
is already in the box. Shortening is great because it has a long shelf life — it doesn't
have any water in it, like butter does. Dr. Miller says the problem with shortening is
that it breaks foams — the air bubbles that we're talking about. But science has a solution.
"All the dry ingredients and the shortening go through this cake finisher, which kinda
just smears the shortening on the flour particles. So if you take a cake mix and you kinda like
grab a handful and squeeze it, it'll kinda stick together. That's why — because of
the shortening. So, that's how they get enough fat, for great flavor and soft texture, because
it's done that way. Because if they just had free shortening, then it will break the foam
and you won't be able to get as much air whipped in."
And now we come to the flour itself. Boxed cakes are typically what bakers call "high-ratio
cakes," meaning that they actually have more sugar in them than flour, because A) People
like sugar, B) Because really sweet cakes tend to keep for longer, and the shortening
helps with that too, and C) Really sweet cakes are stronger, structurally. You can build
multi-layer cakes out of them without their air-pockets collapsing, and the bites will
be less crumbly on your fork.
"So when you have a high-ratio cake, which has so much sugar, then the flour used for
that is typically chlorine-treated. So what the chlorine does, is it changes the properties
of the starch in the flour. So it oxidizes the starch, and that changes how the starch
is able to absorb water. It can now soak up and hold a lot more water."
And those oxidized starches are better at holding everything together in a nice structural
mesh, and preventing the cake from collapsing under the weight of the sugar, the water,
or any additional layers that you're putting on top.
The flour in here has also been more finely milled than normal flour — probably through
a process called pin-milling.
"So after they make the flour, they'll put it through a special little mill with little
pins that really break down the particle size, so it's a very very fine particle size, and
if you kinda feel it, it would just feel real silky."
That, again, helps the flour to gel in the water and create that superior structural
mesh to hold all the other ingredients.
Now, you can buy super-finely milled, chlorinated cake flour at the store. But again, an army
of lab coats have specifically formulated the flour in here to work synergistically
with all of the other ingredients in here. What are the odds that you're gonna top them?
And indeed, even though very few will publicly admit to it, some professional cake bakers
do use boxed cake mixes, at least as a base. They might add additional things to it. That's
what Dr. Miller does at home. My baker friend Adriana says a box cake can be a huge time-saver
in a commercial context. It just takes a sec to mix, and it bakes faster, probably because
it's less dense. But, she says there are some styles of cake that should never be made from
a box, like say pound cake. Pound cake is supposed to exhibit the opposite of all of
these traits that we get from a box.
"It's supposed to be more dense, and I love the crust that's on top, and boxed cakes don't
give you that. Box cakes have a very thin kinda film on top, but it's not a true crust,
like a scratch cake."
But let's assume, for the sake of argument that your goal is to create a cake with the
characteristics of a box cake — something that's light, fluffy, and very sweet. Is there
any reason in that case to not bake from a box? Is it *gasp* cheating?
There's a famous historical anecdote about this. Lots of cake mixes used to have dehydrated
eggs in them. All you had to do was add water. Then in the mid 20th century, a famous psychologist
and marketing expert named Ernest Dichter suggested that manufacturers should try leaving
out the eggs. That way, housewives would feel less like they were cheating. They'd still
be some work for them to do. So that's what the manufacturers did, and then sales skyrocketed.
At least that is the story. Reality is probably a little more complicated than that. If you
want to know more, I recommend this book by food historian and journalist Laura Shaprio.
It's linked in the description.
But anyway, the moral opposition to cake mixes is an example of what I would call the feeling
of virtue without the substance of virtue.
Hardship, self-sacrifice — these are virtuous things when we do them in service of a cause,
like say, some one else's well-being. Like, if I go hungry so that my kids can have food
to eat, that's virtuous.
But what if I refrain from eating purely because I want to look a little bit better on TV?
This is not a hypothetical scenario. I am literally doing this right now. I want more
of that cake so bad. It feels virtuous, because virtue often involves denying yourself something
that you want, but for whom am I sacrificing? What cause am I serving? The cause is purely
my own vanity, and I don't think that's virtuous. I mean I don't think it's bad, either. It
just is.
Likewise, I don't think there's any real virtue in making your own dinner or dessert the hard
way. It's merely the the feeling, the illusion of virtue. So if I want a cake with these
characteristics, I am baking from a box. But I don't always want a cake with these characteristics.
In fact, I really preferred Adriana's scratch version of that cookies and cream cake. And
yes, the recipe for that cake will be my next release.
I'm so grateful that Adriana was willing to share her hard-earned cake skills with me,
and guess what — there's a whole website like that, full of people like that: It's
called Skillshare. It's an online community where instructors share all kinds of creative
and entrepreneurial skills that you can use to enrich — or perhaps even change — your
life.
As much as I clearly believe in the value if YouTube tutorials, Skillshare classes are
much more than that. They go way deeper, they're interactive — you have assignments — and
they're structured. You're not adrift, cobbling together bits from this source and that source.
Some people learn well like that, but most people learn better in a sttuctured environment
with a logical flow. Say you want to learn something harder than cake, you want to learn
how to design user experiences — you know, user interfaces for products. You can take
Marike McCloskey's Intro to UX class. She's one of the world's experts in this stuff.
"So your project in this class is to conduct your own usability evaluation."
You get her class and thousands more Skillshare classes with your membership. It's unlimited.
And you can get two months of Skillshare premium for free by using my link in the description.
And after that, it's just $10 a month for an annual subscription. It's a steal. It's
a New Year, and a new skill can bring all kinds of new things to your life. It sure
has for mine. Thanks to Skillshare for sponsoring this video, and get excited for that cake
recipe. I'ma break all your fitness resolutions.