Appalachian Summer/Fall, 2018, Volume Eight: Zigzag Goldenrod. From mid-summer through the first frost of autumn, numerous species of goldenrod (Solidago) bloom in Appalachia’s meadows and open woods and along its roadsides and stream banks; by September and October, it is the dominant wildflower of the fall landscape, spreading in resplendent, golden waves over hill and hollow. Among the most unusual of the group is zigzag goldenrod (Solidago flexicaulis), whose composite flowerheads cluster along the stalk rather than forming a more typical terminal cluster at the end of the stalk. This perennial herb in the Asteraceae family gets its name from the change of angle of the stalk from one leaf node to the next, although the pattern is sometimes subtle and hard to notice. The flowerheads are composed of four yellow ray florets and as many or more disk florets. The lanceolate to ovate leaves are broader below the flower clusters, coarsely toothed, and arranged in an alternate pattern on the stalk.
Zigzag goldenrod is one of a few species of Solidago that prefers woodland habitats and adds a vibrant note of color to the forest’s green understory.
If y’all use a decent box mix and use melted butter instead of vegetable oil, an extra egg, and milk instead of water, no one can tell the difference. I sure as hell can’t.
Also, if you add a little almond extract to vanilla cake, or a little coffee to chocolate cake, it sends it through the roof.
This concludes me attempting to be helpful.
yo I can vouch for this I’ve done this for the last few cakes I’ve made and holy crap it makes suuuuch a difference the cake is still fluffy, but it also seems more dense, and it doesn’t dry out like at all you can leave it uncovered on the counter all day after being cut into, and it won’t get all crusty and dry this is an amazing way to take your cakes to the next level
Does this count as cake hacks?
cake: hacked
OK but if you’re adding all that to the mix why not just scratch bake? There are literally only four ingredients you’re NOT adding yourself at this point.
It’s always so baffling when mix hackers give you a whole ass cake recipe. Like there’s some kind of magic to mixes that needs to form the core of the thing instead of just, a couple dry ingredients and powdered milk.
presumably as a step of intermediate complexity between mix baking and scratch baking, when neither of those fits your complexity needs exactly?
In particular, this is a useful technique for people living in dorms, or traveling, or similar situations!
Baking from scratch means you’ve got to buy a whole tin of baking powder and only use a spoonful, and a whole thing of flour, and maybe multiple kinds of sugar, and maybe cocoa powder, maybe spices, and there’s no way you’re going to use up any of those, you’ll just have to pitch them when you move out.
Not to mention that you’ve got maybe one measuring cup, and there’s no way you’ve got a sifter, and you probably don’t have measuring spoons and how sure are you that your eating spoon is actually the right size…
Scratch baking is great if you’re going to do it regularly! But for situations where it doesn’t make sense to invest in all the tools and ingredients, cake mixes are very practical.
Scratch means you have to worry about ratios. Scratch means you have to keep cake flour on hand. Scratch means you don’t get the benefit of some of the CHEMICALS in the mix that are 100% beneficial to excellent cake.
I bake some things from scratch. Anything requiring creaming a mix is basically a sad joke because all the work is the creaming. Standard cake is not one of them.
Of course, me being me, a standard cake is usually just a component – I don’t actually like “just cake” that much and canned frosting is terrible. So while I don’t scratch bake cake, that cake is getting saturated with tres leches, or put in a trifle, or getting add-ins before baking anyway.
But in a larger sense, who cares? Baking is hard and for fun anyway. Why bake-shame someone?
Just FYI… A LOT of professional bakers (probably more than half) in the US at least use doctored mixes rather than scratch ingredients even for their more expensive cakes like wedding cakes. There are whole forums where they talk about this amongst themselves.
In taste tests they’ve found that while customers may ask for a cake from scratch they often end up preferring the taste and texture of the doctored mixes when all is said and done.
Unless you have some particular allergies or some other reason to avoid box mixes they are often the better way to go.
I’ve been looking into opening up a home bakery and part of the task of producing food for the public is making sure your items are standardized so that every person who gets a cupcake (for instance) is getting the same quality, size, etc., etc.
Doctored mixes really help with that since big companies like Duncan Hines buys in larger quantities, can afford to test/discard bad batches and will rarely have a one-off batch of flour or flavoring that are bad or go bad like you can at home.
Nice seeing this going around again!
My standard cake is box mix + milk for water + melted butter for oil + dash vanilla extract + frosting from scratch. This really seems to hit the right spot for people of “mmm, homemade” but also “exactly like Mom used to make.” (Do that for a yellow cake with chocolate buttercream frosting, add candles, and serve to a college student, for the maximum “this is exactly what I didn’t want to admit I wanted” potential.)
Seconding the addition of coffee to chocolate cake; a tablespoon of instant coffee powder in a dark chocolate cake makes it taste chocolatey-er without actually adding a perceptible coffee flavor (I don’t like coffee flavor, personally, and I still do this).
Another good option is a box lemon cake mix plus maybe 3 lemons. Zest the lemons, set the zest aside, then juice them and use that in place of the water; then use the zest to flavor the frosting. Adds a nice fresh kick.
Chocolate chips can be dumped straight into chocolate cake mix without fussing with anything to compensate. Sprinkles can go into white cake mix to make your own “confetti cake” with any specific color combo you like. Any kind of dried fruit can be chopped to raisin-size, soaked in hot water (or, better yet, hot juice with a couple of citrus peels added) for an hour, drained, and then added to batter.
Replacing part (up to maybe 1/3) of the water with yogurt (and then the rest with milk as usual) will give you a denser cake; make sure to check if it’s cooked through, and bake a little longer if necessary.
Swirling things through batter for that fancy marbled look is easy. Consider melting chocolate chips with butter, or mixing brown sugar with cinnamon and a little melted butter, or making up two different cake mixes and swirling those together.
I swear by the Cake Mix Doctor’s two cookbooks (one’s general, one’s specifically for chocolate cakes). I think every birthday cake I had as a child was out of those.
I started in my early days by using Betty Crocker mixes – an expensive import in Northern Ireland at the time, but very convenient since some of them were complete kits including a foil cake-tin. They also included cakes I’d never heard of – Red Velvet, Devil’s Food and Angel Food (why not Angel’s Food?)
NB, Angel Cake over here is a completely different thing made up of coloured layers.
After a while, with my Mum’s help, I started tweaking with an extra egg here, a bit of cream there, and the results were always good.
Though @dduane is a far better
cake-baker than I’ll ever be, she also uses mixes to see how they stack up
against made-from-scratch versions especially if the mixes produce something
Really Nice – like, for instance, Betty Crocker brownies – or are more convenient with no huge drop in quality…..
Here’s an example: about 10 years ago
Kremówka Papieska / “The Pope’s Cream Cake” was mentioned as one of the EU 50th-birthday cakes, and DD made it from scratch.
A bit later we found Gellwe-brand mix in one of our local branches of Polonez, and tried that too. The home-made one was definitely better, but the boxed version was also very good, needed only basic extras – milk, butter, sugar etc. – and took far less time to make (though after tasting the custard we added a bit extra vanilla extract…)
That’s why we still have a box in the store-cupboard.
Just in case one or both of us feel like pontifficating… :->
this is whats called a ‘coffer dam’, you basically build some walls, drop them in the water, tie them together, and then pump out the water from your new hole in the water so you can build while staying dry
its oddly not that hard- the flippin ROMANS were able to do it with logs and mud
occasionally particularly devious people would use this to hide treasure or tombs underneath the river so its not only impossible to find but impossible to get to without an engineer division
that last part gives me ideas for campaigns
“Not that hard – the ROMANS were able to do it” – people seriously underestimate how advanced some ancient cultures were and the organized effort it takes to come up with something like this and actually implement it. The Romans had heated floors, glass windows and ceilings that could be rotated to reflect what you were eating (forests for game, sea landscapes for fish). Hell, the Greeks built cameras and moving robots. The Minoans, who lived four thousands years ago and were wiped out by a tsunami three times as powerful as the one which devasted Japan in 2011, had running water and modern toilets. And let’s not get into how China basically invented everything centuries before anyone else.
Bottom line: just because someone was already doing it thousands of years ago, doesn’t mean it’s not very difficult and an extraordinary feat of engineering.
someone: you build how many bridges on a single military campaign…?
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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