Duff Goldman's Simple Tip For The Most Flavorful Boxed Cake Mix You've Had

You might be surprised that Food Network star and legendary cake creator, Duff Goldman, has any kind of advice for improving boxed cake mix. After all, professional pastry chefs and experienced home bakers are experts in creating pastry goodness from scratch, cutting no corners in their craft. But Goldman isn't any stuffy baker. He's a down-to-earth, fun-loving pastry chef who enjoys educating everyone in the art of sweets, as evidenced by his hosting gigs on several kid's baking shows. He's cool with baking baby steps and even had his own line of premium cake mixes. According to Goldman, one of the best ways you can improve a boxed cake mix is to add spices to the mix.

Whether it's cinnamon, nutmeg, or cloves, a touch of spice can add incredible depth of flavor to many flavors of boxed cake mixes. You can play around with the amounts of spice you use depending on how strong you want the flavor to be. And you certainly don't need to stop at spices in your quest to supercharge your boxed cakes. Try swapping melted butter for the vegetable oil that most cake mixes call for, or disregard the instructions completely by adding an additional egg over what the directions call for.

Duff Goldman is pretty easy going in his advice regarding adding spices to boxed cake mixes. He suggests simply using what you've got in your pantry. Let's start with cinnamon, which most people have stocked at any given time. Warm cinnamon plays nicely with a variety of different cake flavors, like vanilla or yellow cake, chocolate, red velvet, German chocolate, and even angel food cake. In fact, when you add cinnamon, plus nutmeg, cloves, and ginger to a yellow cake mix, you're basically making a spice cake.

Ground ginger could also add a warm yet bright note to lemon cake mix. Include a touch of turmeric for a gorgeous, vibrant hue. With strawberry cake mix, try adding a bit of cardamom, or a specialty spice blend, like a cardamom rose spice dust (it wouldn't hurt to mix in some chopped pistachios to this flavor of cake). For chocolate boxed cake, go for a bold, Mexican chocolate-inspired flavor by including chili powder and cinnamon. Now that you're getting bolder and braver with your spice additions, you can try something like pineapple cake mix flavored with a little Chinese five spice. Another idea if you want to try several flavors at once is to make your boxed cake mixes into cupcakes. Don't add your spices until the batter is in individual cupcake liners, then sprinkle on various spices and carefully mix them in each cup.