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Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 5, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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There's something I wanted to talk about for a while. Desserts.

No, not the arid terrains with sand dunes and camels. The sweet things people sometimes eat at the end of the meal. Those ones.

So, when I came to live in the US (a while ago), I found the dessert game in the most restaurants - even upscale ones (not the Michelin level - I am not rich enough to go to those) - is pitifully bad. In general, in the States, you can have a good meal in many places, serving wide variety of cuisines. I have had hundreds of excellent meals. Finding an excellent dessert was much harder.

Most places have chocolate cake, maybe a cheesecake, maybe ice cream. Crème brûlée if they are fancy (over half of them won't make it right though). Maybe couple more options, but that's it. Nothing to write home about.

Cafés are even worse. Unless it's one of those rare specialized shops, you get muffins, croissants, maybe lemon loafs, and those enormous cookies whose point I still can't get. If they feel fancy, maybe some French macarons. But usually that's it. For any real variety - and the world of pastry and patisserie is no less varied than the world of main dishes - you need to go to a specialized shop. Which are quite rare. I have probably a dozen of cake shops around - but I don't need a whole frickin wedding cake! I just want something small and nice to have with my coffee. But within at least 20 minute drive of my place, I see maybe one place with decent variety (which is also closed half of the week - probably because lack of patrons?). Despite over half a million people living around. Back when I lived in Silicon Valley (~3 mln people?), I knew some decent places, but also not too many, especially outside of SF.

So why is this happening? Do Americans hate desserts? Do they just not care? Or am I just not looking at the right places and it is my ignorance that is causing me to suffer (as usual)?

I remember when I first visited the US (even longer while ago, over 20 years now) it was nearly the same situation with beer. It's not that you couldn't get a decent beer at all. It's that you can't expect a random or even upscale place to have even a half decent beer game, and you needed to go to special places for weird people to get a good beer. Now the situation has been, thankfully, greatly changed. Even in a random pub you can have one-two decent beers on draft, more in cans/bottles, any self-respecting restaurant would have some local crafts and some nationally popular choices, a good pub would have dozens, and it's not unheard of to encounter a multi-page beer menu in a non-specialized place. And even the most mundane supermarkets would bother to present a respectable selection.

Could this happen to the sweets too? I understand the complexities (beer is much easier to pack and preserve than sweets), but maybe there's still hope?

I've been meaning to make a long post about why it's not possible to get a good cake (at a reasonable price) for a while.

Sounds like an interesting topic, as someone who not good at baking I'm curious to learn more.

Here is an amazing chocolate cake mix, if you're looking for something you can make at home. I have high standards for chocolate cake and am happy to make one from scratch, but this mix does a darn good job. You'll still need to make the frosting yourself - I'd recommend a swiss meringue buttercream.

IMO box mixes are never worth it. They aren't actually any easier, since making a basic cake is already super duper easy. Dump ingredients in a bowl, mix, pour batter and bake. The only thing that a box mix saves you is measuring out dry ingredients. And more often than not, you're going to have a better cake if you make it from scratch! Box mixes are truly a ripoff which doesn't add value and only preys on novices who don't know better, imo.

That was certainly my belief in the past. This mix changed my mind.

Here is the recipe I use when I'm making a cake from scratch. It takes me about a half hour to put together (not counting baking time). The mix I linked to takes 5 minutes. Very little difference in the final result.

Now I'm hungry for chocolate cake.

I've made that recipe, actually. It took me almost no effort to put together, lol. Like I said, with a basic cake there's no need to follow the instructions about "do this, then this, then this". Just dump all the ingredients in your bowl, mix, and you're done. That's why I think box mixes are a ripoff, because making a cake from scratch is every bit as easy (unless you're trying to make a more advanced recipe like genoise or something, but a box mix isn't going to help you there).

It's not necessarily about ease of use. This video explains that mix cakes contain emulsifiers that allow for textures that would otherwise be difficult or impossible to achieve. And since these emulsifiers coat the flour at the particulate level, it's not the kind of thing you can do outside of an industrial process. Whether or not you actually like this effect is a matter of personal taste, but mix cakes and scratch cakes are decidedly not the exact same thing.

The mix @janeerie linked to doesn't have any emulsifiers on the ingredients list.

TIL, fair enough.