One of my favorite websites sent out a link to their recipe for confetti cake. It is made with artificial coloring (in the confetti), colorless artificial vanilla (for that true “box cake” flavor), egg white, oil, and cake flour (bleached). My husband and I must be the only people left in the world who have no nostalgia for cake made from boxed cake mixes. Truly, if you want those flavors, it’s easier and much cheaper to go to a (bad) bakery and order your birthday cake.

I worked in a wonderful bakery that made the Danish dough from scratch but used an “apricot” glaze packaged in gallon metal tins and took orders for “bakeoff” pies that  were premade and frozen off site and merely baked in the bakery oven. The ingredients? I could not even begin to say, but by my twenties I knew enough not to eat one.

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