Boxed Cake Mixes and Canned Frosting: A Fallen Favorite

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!

Moving back to a place with Cake Frosting

Moving, it is always a hassle and not in the oh no I have to pack up these boxes type way but the oh my gosh if I don't figure out how to fit this gigantic pot into this teeny tiny box then it will be sitting here in France while I am trying to whip up a loving meal in New York sans necessary equipment! The real news right now though is this french version of Craigslist.org... Leboncoin.fr! It is great and surprisingly they have gone beyond the selling scope of Craigslist to include every single region in France so whether you live in a small town of 400 or an enormous town of 2 million, you can get your "stuff" out there and in front of those who are willing to buy it. Those items that are just junk to me are, as I read somewhere one time, someone else's treasure! So someone else somewhere in this vast country (even though its smaller than Texas) is out there waiting to buy my vacuum cleaner, my dishwasher AND my microwave along with my ipod speakers, my floor length mirror, my bathroom scale and my multi-plug plugs! Can we say "amazing!"! Leboncoin.fr is making my life so much simpler as we speak. I am not having to worry over leaving my poor ipod speakers sitting in the corner of an empty apartment collecting dust while I make my trek back to the great US because someone already agreed to purchase at my asking price. I am instead getting to enjoy my week, plan what souvenirs I need to grab before heading back and bake lots and lots of cupcakes (with frosting I brought back from the US!) to travel with us to Nice for Easter weekend.

Je ne comprend pas!

Well, I take great comfort my French must be good enough for everyone to understand "Je ne comprend pas" (I don't understand). I must be saying something right although they do continue to speak French to me,..maybe they are somehow under the impression I am French and only misunderstood them and not simply do not understand a word that is coming out of their mouth!

Soner says I will not have jet lag because I started going to bed at the time he goes to bed when I got here and that the jet lag days have passed behind me. I disagree. I only stayed awake all day Saturday and Sunday because what choice did I have?? Sleep both those days and then he will work for the week and I have no one to show me around OR force myself awake and enjoy it? So I take naps, 2 hr naps in the afternoons and try to sleep late in the mornings. A bit difficult as I believe every moped bike in the city drives past our hotel and revves its engine just to spite me.

After laying in bed for hours this morning, I finally dragged myself up and out of the room to Sephora! A comforting place! Most all of the products had English and French descriptions so it was perfect. I also stumbled upon a wonderful place, the Mono Prix. Not much of an exciting place to most but for me it was heavenly! It means I no longer have to trek the endless miles (If it wasn't miles, it sure felt like it was!) to get to the supermarche' at the end of the city (so I only actually did that long walk once but it made such an impression on me). This place is a bit smaller but do I really need ALL those choices of food the big supermarche' has to offer? I think I may be the only person who gets excited about grocery stores. I have favorites in every city I have been in! In Shreveport, definitely Brookshires on Line Avenue, Baton Rouge it was Albertsons on Bluebonnet Blvd, San Diego Ralphs in La Jolla, Chicago...hmm I only ever went to Dominics across the street because I am too lazy to walk to another but I went there often to walk around and think of something to buy and in Istanbul the grocery store in Kanyon Mall, maybe also because it was the only one I ever frequented to walk around and look at all the food. I sound like a nerd more and more as I go through this post, don't I?

Last night I met a lot of Soner's CLP friends. There were 11 of us in total and a baby. We had Morocan food with lots and lots of couscous! The food was pretty good and the mixture of people were quite funny. There were two people from the United States, a New Yorker and Houstonian. The majority of everyone else seem to be from Russia with perfect English! The night was nice but there was no one on the streets when we left a little after 10. It was very quiet..almost spooky quiet.

Ok one more thing, the perfect coke..I found it! It is a miniature canned version of the regular thing. It is a real can and a real coke with only 64 calories to the can. It is the most wonderful size as I cannot actually finish a real coke ever so this is not wasteful and you don't feel the need to drink an entire 12 oz coke just because it is there.