Is This Baking Now?

When I think of baking, I generally think of baking some sort of cake or bread-type thing. I don’t really think of using cake mixes; I think of making everything “from scratch”.

But more and more baking recipes that I see now are just mixing some cake mixes with other pre-prepared stuff and sticking it in the oven. It’s actually rather funny to see how far baking has fallen!

from “I Wash You Dry” blog

For instance, the following picture is from this cooking blog depicts ingredients for a cake. Now we can’t make Orange Crush very easily I don’t think, and most of us don’t have Mandarin oranges on hand in our backyards, but it seems as if the whole point of making a cake would be to make a cake and in my book, that does not mean to go to the grocery store and pick up a box of cake mix. Whipped cream in my book means buying some heavy cream and whipping it, not getting a box of Dream Whip, but, I guess, to each his own.

Baking, it seems, has changed a bit. Yes, we have used a box of cake mix from time to time, but it’s pretty rare. Usually it’s my father using it to bake my mother a birthday day. We’ve never used Dream Whip before, but we have used Cool Whip – usually when someone doesn’t want to run to the store and they find a container of Cool Whip in the freezer. So I don’t want to get too snobby.

Anyway, I guess I can appreciate actual baking even more now! My mother is currently watching all of the shows from The Great British Bake-Off that she can get her hands on. I wonder if you could become “Star Baker” with the ingredients in the picture 🙂