Lisa Messinger's
Cookbook Corner

The Cake Mix Doctor

by Anne Byrn (Workman)

Anne Byrn never met a cake mix she didn't like.

While the rest of us might think of a box of cake mix as boring—convenient and quick, but definitely boring—Byrn sees a work of art waiting to be sculpted. Byrn has given herself the well-deserved title of Cake Mix Doctor because of the resuscitation she gives mixes.

When she sees yellow or white cake mix, she scrubs up and performs surgery to turn it into Butter Layer Cake With Sweet Lime Curd, Toasted Coconut Sour Cream Cake or Kentucky Buttermilk Raisin Cake. Chocolate mixes get a face-lift to emerge as Macadamia Fudge Torte, Chocolate Kahlua Cake or Lethal Peppermint Chocolate Cake. There are more than 150 tempting recipes.

Byrn, former food editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution who started this book as an article for the Tennessean newspaper in Nashville, where she now lives, explains how keeping simple ingredients on hand such as milk, eggs, nuts, coconut, chocolate, extracts, cream cheese and sour cream can turn anyone's pantry into a cake doctoring mecca. Guests will have a hard time believing these cakes are not homemade—if you even decide to divulge your secret.

How, for instance, can plain spice cake mix emerge from the operating room as a much healthier Upside-Down Apple Skillet Cake? First, the mix gets an addition of dark corn syrup and then a topping of Jonathan apples, brown sugar, butter and cinnamon. Coconut-Pecan Gooey Butter Cake started as plain yellow cake mix. Byrn added the coconut and chopped pecans to the mix and then created a vanilla-cream cheese filling. There's really no end to Byrn's helpfulness.

Her introduction details every part of cake baking from oven temperature and rack position, to mixing, to testing for doneness, to "the art" of greasing and flouring. ("I can't say enough about the old-fashioned method of greasing pans with solid vegetable shortening and then flouring them. This imparts no flavor to the cake and forms a nice, firm, easily frosted crust.")

Cake Doctor tips are sprinkled throughout. Every cake, accompanied by its page number, is shown in a photograph chart at the beginning of the book. Byrn also shows how to make cookies, bars and cupcakes from cake mixes. She dissects and explains cake mixes, as well as giving a historical time line. (In 1842, a cook in Baltimore patented self-rising flour, the beginning of the mix, for instance).

And she gives lots of tips as to how you can earn your own cake doctoring medical degree by creating your own cakes. Her page on toppings, for instance, instructs how to quickly and easily throw together basic streusel, oat streusel, nut streusel as well as chocolate and other crowns.

I can attest to the pride you feel at doctoring your own cheat sheet cake. A while back, tired of preparing from-scratch time robbers, within minutes, I had created a from-a-mix chocolate layer cake that used pumpkin pie filling (that I stole directly from a store-bought pumpkin pie) in its layers. The store-bought vanilla frosting became custom with the quick addition of cinnamon and other spices. The quick cake drew raves and requests for its recipe.

I'm glad Byrn turned up with her bible. It deliciously saves all of us from having to spend time devising our own shortcuts.

RECIPES

—Upside-Down Apple Skillet Cake
—Toasted Coconut Sour Cream Cake