Baking Outside the Box

True story: A friend, known for her gourmet cooking, needed to make a cake. Fast. Neighbors were coming, kids were screaming, laundry was piling--the normal meltdown. So she grabbed a box of cake mix, whipped in some smashed bananas and chocolate chips and shoved it in the oven.

The neighbors devoured it.

“This is delicious. Give us the recipe,” they begged. My friend, embarrassed, demurred. They insisted. She stalled. They kept asking. She tried to avoid them. They left messages. Finally, she went to the market, bought a box of the mix she had used, rang her neighbor’s doorbell and thrust it in her face. “This is my recipe!” she screamed at the astonished woman.

So much for cake-mix guilt.

Anne Byrn, for one, has had enough of it. Byrn is the author of “The Cake Mix Doctor” (Workman, $14.95), a wildly successful new cookbook that revels in what she calls every home baker’s “guilty pleasure”--doctoring a cake mix with everything from marshmallows to Miracle Whip to mandarin oranges to make it taste as if it were made from scratch.

Her collection of inventive cakes and even cookies fashioned from boxed mixes sold nearly 260,000 copies in the past six months, the fastest-selling cookbook Workman Publishing has introduced in five years, says a spokesman. It was the No. 1 seller on the Los Angeles Times Cookbook Hot List for four months (it’s now No. 2) and is a top-selling cookbook for online bookseller Amazon.com. The book’s popularity has also spawned a Web site (https://www.cakemixdoctor.com) with a recipe exchange and a newsletter.

Yet Byrn also knows that people can be embarrassed to come out of the pantry and admit that their “homemade” cakes have been helped with mixes. “I’ve met food writers who confess they bake this way and beg me not to tell,” she says.

More typical is the woman in Raleigh, N.C., who came to a recent book signing holding two of Byrn’s cookbooks. “I only bake from scratch,” the woman told her self-righteously. “These,” she said, gesturing to the books, “are for friends.”

Riiiight.

Byrn does agree that plain cake made straight from a box is pretty mediocre. There’s that nasty “cake-mix taste” from the artificial flavorings and other ingredients that make mixes so fast and flub-proof. But mask that aftertaste with your own additions, top with an easy homemade frosting (canned frostings are un-doctorable garbage, she says) and, she insists, you’ll have a signature dessert that’s as good as many traditional scratch creations. In fact, she calls this kind of baking “speed scratch.”

Her book chronicles a kitchen sinkful of doctoring ideas from the bizarre to the benign. There’s an entire chapter of wacky classics that include Tomato Soup Spice Cake, Cola Cake (chocolate with cola and marshmallows), Orange Dreamsicle Cake (the secret is Miracle Whip) and Incredible Melted Ice Cream Cake.

On the tamer side, there are dozens of chocolate-cake variations, as well as potluck favorites like cinnamon-y Snickerdoodle Cake and a rich Banana Cake With Quick Caramel Frosting. And for those with a bake-sale deadline looming and little time to spare, there’s a chapter on cookies, including fudgy Double-Chocolate Chewies made with devil’s-food cake mix and chocolate chips.

Still, one can’t help but ask: If cake mixes have to be doctored to taste like scratch, why not just bake from scratch? Isn’t this just the dumbing down of real baking?

“People who ask that are snobs,” says Byrn bluntly. “They have no clue how the rest of the world lives. For a huge number of people, skill is a big issue. They don’t care to learn to bake from scratch.” Meaning, having the ingredients at room temperature, measuring out the flour and leavening, creaming the butter and sugar, adding the eggs one by one--and praying it comes out right. The cake mix, thanks to a huge helping of chemical emulsifiers and leavening, does most of that grunt work. What’s left, she says, “is the fun part.”

Americans have been using cake mixes for about 50 years, since the first mixes, complete with powdered eggs, were introduced in 1947 by General Mills and in 1948 by Pillsbury Co.

It wasn’t until 1951, when Duncan Hines introduced a cake mix that called for adding fresh eggs, that the popularity of cake mixes exploded. In just three weeks, the Duncan Hines Three Star Special (so-called because you could make a white, yellow or chocolate cake from the same mix) captured nearly half the mix market.

The love affair continues today. Americans buy more than 300 million boxes of cake mix a year, according to industry estimates, and the reason, says Byrn, is simple: “Psychologically, the cake mix is like your best friend. It’s dependable, it’s there in a pinch and it makes you look good.”

It also creeps into your pantry when you have kids, she adds. She has three young children (her son was born while she was writing her book) and every week, it seems, she’s being asked to bring a treat for a classroom party, a bake sale, a Scout meeting. “It changes the way you bake,” she admits.

Ironically, Byrn used to be one of those purists who baked only from scratch. She had gone to La Varenne cooking school in France and had been food editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution for many years. More important, she grew up in the South, the heart of the Cake Belt, where baking skills are revered. She thought nothing of spending an hour or two preparing a chocolate cake worthy of a pastry chef.

That changed two years ago when Byrn moved back to her hometown of Nashville to become a full-time mom. She wrote a story for the local newspaper on how to jazz up cake mixes and invited readers to send her their favorite mix recipes. Within a week, 500 recipes had arrived by mail, fax and computer. A follow-up story brought hundreds more. She knew she had hit a nerve.

Better yet, she knew she had a hit book.