The Great Mix-Up

We all have those dirty little secrets in our kitchens, and I don’t mean the dust bunnies under the fridge. Mine is the chocolate cake. It’s demanded of me every Thanksgiving buffet, every birthday party come October. (It’s made with a mix! Shhh!) So it’s with a knowing smile that I thumb through “The Cake Mix Doctor” by Anne Byrn (Workman, $14.95), because Byrn has hit on something here: There are many of us who occasionally rely on cake mixes. Anyone with kids knows this. Same with those of us called upon to furnish baked goods at church functions, Cub Scout meetings or office potlucks. We know who we are.

Thanks to Byrn, we can come out of the pantry. Her neatly designed, easy-to-read paperback has 175 recipes that turn Betty Crocker and Duncan Hines into such creations as Easy Tiramisu, Holiday Yule Log, Rum Balls and Chocolate Macadamia Biscotti. Many of the ideas come from home bakers who showered Byrn with their recipes when she wrote a story about cake mixes for the Nashville Tennessean.

Left untouched, she writes, cake mixes can be ho-hum. But spruced up, they turn out to be pretty darn good--without too much ingredient fussing or fear that the cake won’t rise. The book includes the history of the cake mix, baking tips and--my favorite part--postage-stamped-size pictures inside the cover featuring every recipe in the book. In color. Now, when do we eat?