Boxed Cake Mix in Southern Living?

Convenience? An affront to civilization? Or capitulation to faux food?

So many Southerners have abandoned Southern Living. But I have hung on with a fierce loyalty in spite of everything. But this evening, when I sat down to enjoy the January edition, I nearly fainted when I saw the theme of their storied cake recipes. Cakes made with *cake mix.* My god in heaven. What has this world come to?

For my entire adult life, I have collected, sampled, and served cakes. For many years, I baked the winner of the Kentucky State Fair Favorite Cake contest as soon as it was published in the Louisville Courier-Journal. I baked my own wedding cake (the one contributed by Martha Stewart in the Julia Child Baking book). When I bought my first house, a 1923 Craftsman on Baker Hill in Hazard, Ky., I hosted an open house and made a cake for every decade of my house’s life, reflecting the baking trends of each decade.

My two grandmothers were superb self-taught bakers; my paternal grandmother Eva Jones was the community master of the Apple Stack Cake.

My maternal grandmother Gladys Kelly had many favorites, but the best was her White Buttermilk Cake. Did these mountain masters teach me to bake?

No.

Hell no.

These women were not the type to have soft-focus cozy Hallmark moments at the stove with grandchildren. My grandmother Kelly would backhand you with a spatula if you dared wander in the Cooking Zone while she was working.

“This kitchen in here, this is my department,” my Mammy Kelly would say, with the emphasis on MY.

The artistry required to make her incredible biscuits was lost. One year I came home from college, and Mammy Kelly tried a new recipe for yeast biscuits. They were delicious and I asked how she made them. She pulled out a lined notepad she kept in her kitchen and wrote down the recipe. After three failed attempts, I asked my mom for help.

“What could I possibly be doing wrong?” I asked.

She snapped back. “Probably the same thing that happened to me when I asked her for the recipe for her White Buttermilk Cake. She left out the Cream of Tartar and soda so mine wouldn’t be as good as hers.”

Sobered, I gave up on angel biscuits until one day when I noticed the recipe on the back of the White Lily Flour bag.

Southern Living was the cake-baking grandma I never had. Back in the 1980s, I loved making a dramatic presentation of their Amaretto Cheesecake. As a new wife, I bought a monthly subscription to The Southern Heritage cookbook series, a part of Southern Living. Although these volumes were thin, they were filled with recipes, as well as cooking techniques and historic references. The cake cookbook had their Cream Cheese Poundcake, which is still my go-to pound cake recipe.

But the highlight of the year was the Southern Living Christmas edition, always featuring a show-stopping cake for the Southern baker’s Christmas table.

This past Christmas I served my dinner guests Southern Living’s classic Hummingbird Cake. Hummingbird Cake was first submitted to Southern Living in 1978 by Mrs. L.H. Wiggins of Greensboro, North Carolina, and has been featured in the magazine many times since.

At the same party in 2018, I made Southern Living’s Tennessee Jam Cake in a tube cake pan.

A few years before it was Southern Living’s Orange Curd Italian Cream Cake.

So what is wrong with cake mix?

Cake mix uses chemicals that cause the cake to mix together better, to rise more reliably and to maintain consistency. In other words, it compensates for a baker’s lack of skill by using chemistry. Most cake mixes use sodium stearoyl lactylate as an emulsifier and xanthan gum as a thickener and stabilizer. Many also include high maltose corn syrup, which most home bakers would not use as a sweetener.

Many people, including myself, can detect a distinct chemical taste in boxed cake mixes. One theory is that we are supertasters, people who have a higher number of taste receptors in the fungiform papillae — the pink bumps on your tongue that contain taste buds.

Another theory is that people who regularly use cake mixes have become accustomed to the taste and don’t find it objectionable.

When I posted on my Facebook page my horror at Southern Living’s capitulation to boxed cake mixes, one friend said that she had good luck with Anne Byrn’s “Cake Mix Doctor” recipes. Under my breath, I thought. Who. is. this. person.???

Turns out she is from Nashville and has sold millions of boxed cake recipe books. Why on earth would a person who trained at LaVarenne in Paris invest her career in doctoring cake mixes? Turns out, she was a journalist who went to cooking school to improve her skills. Later, she had three children, and cake mix baking fit her lifestyle. She published a book on doctored cake mixes, and with the success of the cookbook, she became a television personality and QVC salesperson.

Byrne was questioned by the Orange County Register about why she used cake mixes. Here response:

Am I a cake snob for feeling like baking with a cake mix is tantamount to the Visigoths streaming over the Seventh Hill of Rome? Was I tragically overinvested in my 40-year crush on Southern Living and its shameless parade of showstopping cakes, only to learn it was all a one-way street? Am I heartlessly throwing shade at overbooked suburban moms just trying to expedite a little birthday cake for the kiddos?

No. Bake anything you want. Buy anybody’s cake mix cookbook on QVC. Build a shrine to Duncan Hines.

But please don’t judge me for wishing we could put the brakes the suggestion that the lovely domestic art of baking with fresh ingredients for people you love should be replaced with cheap and easy. Haven’t we let that happen to enough of our food?