These Cakes Are So Luxe, No One Will Believe They Came From a Box - Bon Appetit

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Let’s not beat around the bush: This is a $25 box cake mix. That’s $23.71 more than a Betty Crocker SuperMoist vanilla cake mix at Target, and I am deeply sorry for introducing the word “SuperMoist” into your day. So, if their competition is another box cake mix, the Caker’s boxed kits are shockingly expensive. But if you accept that they have more in common with a $50 cake from a high-end bakery than they do with an industrially produced mix that contains “propylene glycol mono and diesters of fatty acids,” then they’re actually a pretty great deal.

The Caker is the brainchild of Jordan Rondel, a self-taught baker from New Zealand who bears a resemblance to a young, tattooed Jane Birkin. She opened her Auckland bakery a decade ago, selling beautiful but unfussy cakes with naked sides, strewn with fruit and topped with pert roses. Now living in LA, she saw a market for her lemon strawberry poppyseed, flourless dark chocolate, and matcha cherry cakes—but in mix form, without the stabilizers and additives found in many commercial boxed offerings.

You—yes you!—can make this.

Photo by Liz Barclay

The fudgy and rich flourless chocolate cake is the runaway hit of the trio. Pop open the box, and the price point starts to make sense. There’s the pouch with the dry ingredients—sugar, almond meal, and Dutch process cocoa—but there’s also a bag of Callebaut dark chocolate callets and a sheet of edible gold leaf. Premium! You’ll need to provide your own butter, eggs, and cake pan, but a handy pre-cut circle of parchment is included. After 50 minutes of bake time (the instructions say 40, but I found all three cakes needed longer in my oven), the cake is ready to be speckled with gold leaf and served, if you so choose, with a dollop of lightly sweetened crème fraîche (not included).

The flourless chocolate cake is by nature gluten-free, and although the lemon strawberry poppyseed and matcha cherry cakes aren’t, they too contain some almond flour. This lends all of the cakes a moist (dare I say, SuperMoist?) consistency with a dense crumb—think custardy and tender, not light and springy. The poppyseed and matcha cakes can also be made vegan; simply swap in alt-milk and oil for cow’s milk and butter. And while you will need to provide your own fresh or frozen fruit for the non-chocolate flavors, the kit includes everything you need for decorating. That’s the gold leaf for the chocolate cake and a glaze and freeze-dried fruit for the other two. Even without Rondel’s signature fresh flowers, the cakes look like they’re straight from an expensive bakery. Who would believe a cake dripping in gold came from a box?

The Caker Cake Kits

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These Cakes Are So Luxe, No One Will Believe They Came From a Box - Bon Appetit
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