Apricot cream tart
The team are making a few food-related issues okay this week: It's okay to not eat breakfast if that's not what your body needs. Thank you Mikki for allowing me to rest easy on that one (page 12). It's okay to use packet cake mixes. Allyson Gofton keeps them in her pantry for unexpected guests and says the secret is to make them more "homemade" with interesting toppings or fillings, as per her apricot cream tart on page 6.
It's also okay to not have a clue what's for dinner tonight because we have to answer that darn question 365 days every year and sometimes we are simply uninspired. We have four weeknight winners to help you out on page 8 and opposite.
The baking ingredients aisle in the supermarket, once loaded with flours, sugars, dried fruits, nuts and flavourings, is under threat of extinction. Baking, like so many other cookery styles, is becoming an assembly job, as packet mixes nudge their way into places where once the iconic Edmonds baking powder reigned supreme.
It would be easy for this bake-a- holic to decry the packet cake mix but, in fact, I find having a packet of Classic Golden Butter Cake in the pantry a useful — and sensible — move. It’s not that I can’t tell the difference between the I- made- it- from- scratch butter cake recipe and a packet version butter cake, but it can at times be relied upon to help young kids get into cooking — it’s only mix and bake — and provides an instant answer for a dessert for unexpected guests.
Packet cakes have had a long road to tread. They were conceived after WW1 by a Pittsburgh baker, John Duff, who recognised a need in his local market to assist war- poor families put a cake on the table. He cut costs by reducing the ingredients required to make a cake, also cutting the preparation time. Duff’s first patented packet mix for gingerbread contained wheat flour, molasses, sugar, shortening, salt, baking soda, powdered whole egg, ginger and cinnamon. Initially sales were good, but soon plateaued as cooks in the 1930s battled conscience over convenience. Adding water was not making a cake by hand. The issue was resolved by the removal of the dried egg from the mix and a requirement to use fresh eggs. The action of getting an egg from the pantry, breaking it into the bowl and beating the mixture was sufficient validation for the cook to say, “It’s home- made”.
I recall touring foodie towns of the Mississippi in the early 90s and staying in B& Bs. Every morning we would be greeted by smiling hosts who, having beavered away in the kitchen making fresh muffins, would proudly show me their home-made baked goods. They were, of course, from packets, but to them they were truly homemade, and the thought of having the individual ingredients on hand and baking from scratch was simply a foreign concept.
Through recent decades, packet cake mixes have been seen as the poor person’s or lazy cook’s