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One-Pot Cakes
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One-Pot Cakes (Canada, UK)
By Andrew Schloss & Ken Bookman
Publisher: William Morrow & Company
Publication Date: August 1995
ISBN: 0688141382Let’s face facts: Making a cake from scratch is not fast and it’s not simple. It requires anywhere from half-a-dozen to 20 ingredients. A speedy cook might prepare the batter in 15 to 20 minutes, but for many of us (especially the mise-en-place challenged) it’s usually more than a half hour (especially if there are egg whites to be whipped). Add in baking, cooling, and frosting time, and you’re starting to talk about a serious cooking project.
Is it any wonder most of the country has turned to boxed cake mixes?
Andrew Schloss and Ken Bookman have written a book that is meant to reverse this national proclivity toward mixes — One-Pot Cakes. The premise of the book is that you can make a wide variety of great tasting, homemade cakes quickly, simply, without a mixer, without sifting flour, without separating eggs — all with one mixing bowl, one or two utensils, a baking pan, and a measuring cup.
To test this thesis, I did a side-by-side comparison. I made two Devil’s Food Cakes, one from One-Pot Cakes and the other from a Betty Crocker mix. For frosting, I made the Chocolate Sour Cream Frosting described in the book, and purchased a Betty Crocker Rich & Creamy Dark Chocolate Frosting (already made, packed in a plastic can) for the mix cake.
The process for making these one-pot cakes is unusual, indeed. The first step is to start melting butter in the pan, until it is half melted. Then any sugar, chocolate, spices, fruit or nut filling, and liquid ingredients are added, followed by eggs, followed by dry ingredients. Baking powder or soda are added by hand before the flour, so that you can break up any clumps and disperse them evenly throughout the batter. In the case of the Devil’s Food Cake, a cup of very hot water is added at the end of the process. The mixture is stirred until blended, and then put in the cake pans to bake.
How did the one-pot cake stack up against Betty Crocker? The score card was mixed. Our editorial staff held a blind taste test, with none of the testers knowing the origin of either cake. In almost all cases, the one-pot cake was judged the better choice. The texture of the one-pot cake was superior, and because of the massive amount of brown sugar it contains, kept moist for days.
The one-pot cake definitely tasted better, but didn’t have as much flavor as a great cake. Frankly, neither cake held a candle to a really good chocolate cake made from scratch. The Betty Crocker frosting produced a better-looking cake (with a glossy sheen) than the one-pot icing (and almost everyone disliked the aftertaste of the icing, which was simply a cup of sour cream blended with 12 ounces of melted chocolate chips).
From a nutritional standpoint, I’m guessing that the one-pot cakes are less politically correct, generally containing butter and eggs as the foundation. On the other hand, they do not include propylene glycol, diesters, sodium-stearoyl lactylate, artificial flavors, or xanthan gum, which is definitely a plus in my book.
The mix was almost infinitely faster and easier to prepare: it took less than 5 minutes to mix the water, vegetable oil, eggs, and cake mix, and to get it into the pan — the oven wasn’t near warmed up when the batter was ready. It took me at least 20 minutes to prepare the one-pot cake. That may have been partly the result of my unfamiliarity with the unusual mixing process, but even if I were up to speed, it would take 15 minutes.
Beyond my own experiments, there is great variety in the recipes in this book, with sections on chocolate cakes, coffee cakes, cupcakes, flourless cakes, fruit & vegetable cakes, and sheet cakes. There are 10 simple icing recipes, as well. There are no photos (and a particularly uninspiring one on the cover). The recipes are almost all in a convenient one-to-a-page format. The instructions are clear and simple. The ingredients called for are easily obtainable.
One-Pot Cakes aims to bridge the great gulf between cakes made from scratch and those from a mix. It succeeds in some areas and falls short in others. In general, it will produce superior tasting cakes — which is a pretty important consideration. For me, though, the number of dishes I use is not nearly as important as the time it takes to prepare the recipe and its overall complexity. In this category, One-Pot Cakes falls short. The recipes are not particularly complicated, but assembling and mixing ingredients is always going to take more time than opening a box and cracking a few eggs. And while you might save a bit of time over making a traditional cake from scratch, the price in somewhat less flavor.
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