This week I thought about the principle of diminishing returns as it applies to cooking and baking. When does additional effort become a waste of time?
A cookbook titled “A New Take on Cake: 175 Beautiful, Doable Cake Mix Recipes” made me want to do an experiment. Was making a cake from scratch worth the extra effort? To find out, I made a “Cinnabon” cake using a recipe from the book and then made a similar cake using scratch ingredients.
I made the Cinnabon cake first and didn’t tweak the recipe like I usually do. The cake was good, but not so delicious that I thought about it a week later. The recipe called for adding 1/2 cup sugar to an already sweet cake mix, and it was too sweet for my taste. Forty minutes elapsed from the moment I stepped into the kitchen until the last dish was washed, dried and put away.
And this is notable: The cake definitely tasted better the next day. Flavors meld in soups and stews, but I didn’t know that happened in baked goods.
Then I made a similar cake from scratch. I rounded up a recipe for a sour cream cinnamon swirl coffee cake. The cake took 12 minutes longer to make than the cake-mix-cake, including the cleanup time. The scratch cake made a bigger mess, and on top of that, the open can of baking powder fell on the floor. Then the neighbors’ dog, Rocky, wandered in for his treat and tracked the powder everywhere.
Kyle said the scratch cake was better, heartier and less sweet than the cake-mix-cake. I thought the scratch cake was better, too, but still not great. Was the extra time and effort worth it? I’m not so sure.
Then I pondered efficiency some more. Truth is, for almost an hour of time, other desserts would be better than either one of those cakes. For example, I could make a rhubarb thing, now that it’s rhubarb season. I created a wickedly good recipe last year for a rhubarb crisp and wrote about it here. The thought of that delicious dessert has crossed my mind more than once since then. The crisp tasted wonderful and felt nourishing to eat. Even an ordinary chocolate chip cookie would be more satisfying than those cakes.
I will try another recipe or two from “A New Take on Cake” before I give up on doctoring up cake mixes. Both the banana cake and lemon cake sound good. Next time I’ll reduce the amount of sugar or eliminate it entirely. I might even substitute applesauce.
The jury is still out on the diminishing returns of cakes. To cake or not to cake: Apparently that is the question!