Tips: If you are using a canned frosting, empty the contents in a bowl and beat on medium-high to whip some air into your frosting. You will end up with more frosting to go around and less calories in every bite!
I have always loved, loved, loved my hidden can of store-bought chocolate frosting tucked into the back of my fridge, back in the corner behind the box of good-for-you yogurt and diet drinks, a place my boyfriend would never look!
Canned chocolate frosting has always been a guilty pleasure of mine. I can remember moving into my first apartment and enjoying the freedom of grabbing a spoon and digging deep into the luscious dark chocolate and pretending to myself I wasn't going to return to the fridge once again after my chocolate high wore off a few minutes later. Imagine my utter surprise when I opened up a highly anticipated can last week only to find it was terrible! The taste made me cringe and even worse, I did not have the ingredients to whip together any fresh frosting in its place so it had to do.
For the past 6 months my entire dessert repertoire has included fresh, made from scratch, delicously, warm your heart, desserts not including the desserts and foods I made in France off and on for the past year before that started the whole baked-from-scratch frenzy. I have always enjoyed baking up cookies, throwing together cakes and stirring up melted marshmallows with a box of rice krispies for the perfect afternoon treat and I longed for these items when I lived in France but with none of their too-few boxed cake mixes could I achieve the great boxed taste of America and forget frosting because that was non-existent in France. I did manage to stow away some cans of frosting because who was I kidding, I couldn't make frosting to save my life!
Upon arriving back in the US, with too much time on my hands and a craving to do something "interesting," I immersed myself in baking cupcakes and throwing together MY perfect frosting which I have yet to actually make perfect but it is delicious nonetheless. In the past, cake was cake, frosting was frosting and it all tasted good but I guess after a while of tasting time after time fresh goods, it is hard to go back to the past because you realize nothing can ever come close to that fresh baked taste.
I whipped up a box mix of Funfetti Cake because as the name implies, it looked like "fun." The cake wasn't bad but it wasn't great either. It was too light to be a cake, it had no real flavor, there was nothing that slapped me in the face and made me go "Ahh, this is the life! This is really yummy!" The same with the canned Chocolate Frosting. It suddenly had an overly sweet taste and an odd texture that I had never noticed before. Maybe the cake could have been saved with a dash of vanilla and one of The Cake Mix Doctor's books as a guide to navigating the boxed world with a little extra finesse but alas I was highly disappointed with my venture back into the commercial grocery store baking world and am afraid I may not return again.
Lesson learned: it is a thin line when you venture over into the baking side. You may think you are coming out ahead with all of your baked, fresh goods but you will never be able to go back and enjoy the perfect simplicity of whipping up a boxed mix again.
I have been in the process of moving for the past couple of weeks so baking has been a bit obsolete. Hopefully things will calm down for a moment at Thanksgiving and I can whip up some great things for the upcoming holiday season!
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