Wendy, I've always found that the easiest cake to make from scratch is chocolate. I tends to be more moist, less tempermental and has a longer shelf life than its vanilla counterparts. Hershey's Cocoa has a great, basic chocolate cake recipe on their can of cocoa that is almost fail proof.

If you're really low on time, need a shortcut and aren't opposed to using a boxed mix, you can easily doctor one to your needs and you can pretty much count on it to come out structurally sound everytime (it will rise, have a good crumb and won't be dry). You can transform a boxed cake mix by starting with a white or vanilla mix and subing juice for the water, adding in extracts, nuts, food coloring, sprinkles, candy and fruit (make sure you reduce the water or liquid considerably if you add in fruit as it will add water to your batter), you can really make it your own without the fuss of dealing with a from scratch base. You will have much less frustration this way and a consistant end result, which is the way to go if you don't have entire weekends to dedicate to making one perfect cake. Use a simple made from scratch butter cream frosting to finish it off and you won't feel guilty at all for cutting corners.

When you get the time though, I do recommend fine tooning some made from scratch versions that you can fall back on in a pinch. You can even premix your dry ingredients and ziplock them for a quick batter on the fly. There's nothing better than a homemade, scratch cake

I don't do many breads but we do make a killer scratch banana cake at the shop (which is basically banana bread with frosting). Is the issue you're having with dryness? If you tell me your results, I can give you pointers on the cause. Is it sinking? Is it too crumbly?

Mostly dryness and at times crumbly. I gave up about 2 years ago but now I feel I should stop being such a baby about it and tackle it again. :)

Try adding more banana to the batter and consider adding an extra egg. Egg adds moisture and binds your ingredients. Also, have you considered trying another recipe? There are a lot of great recipes online that have user comments after them that can be very helpful and insightful. When others have already tried it and posted their notes, it takes a lot of the leg work out of it for you. All Recipes is a good website for that.

Hi Jeff,

The best advice I can give is to practice, practice, practice. And one of the best things I ever did, as a self taught baker, was to do a ton of reading on the contribution each ingredient makes to the batter. If she knows what role eggs play, and the reason for creaming the sugar and the butter and the difference between baking soda and baking powder, she will be able to trouble shoot issues with her baked goods making it easier to improve her products. If she has an interest in cake decorating, the classes at Micheal's are great. It's the only training I've ever had and they teach you all the basics. It's not expensive and she can even take them now at 14. Again, practice is key.

At Nadia Cakes, we hire cake designers based on their portfolio, no culinary degree required. For our bakers we do want people who have a background in baking and usually we go with someone who went to culinary school or has at least two years in the field. If baking professionaly is her career choice, I recommend that she eventually gets her foot in the door at a bakery so she can get some on the job training (which honesty is just as good as culinary school) or she enroll in a culinary baking program. They can be very pricey though, especially the nicer ones. As an employer I prefer to hire people who have a basic knowledge of how to bake and the school does that for me. But as I said before, she can easily teach herself those things by reading up on it. Good luck to her!

Brilliant advice! Thanks Abby :)

Mary,

It's funny that this is coming up because I had the same question from a neighbor just the other day. She said "I baked a cake and it was dry and crumbly and it didn't rise..." I cut her off and I said "Was it lemon?" It was. Lemon cake is a pain. The citrus in the lemon does strange things to cake and I will explain why in a minute. In addition to all the things I just listed above, it will also cause your cup liners to fall off your cupcakes, a major annoyance, especialy when you have a cupcake shop! LOL!

The lemon cake phenomenon is usually due to the leavening you use. Leavening is what makes the cake rise. Specifically baking soda and baking powder. Too little or the wrong kind and you get a flat cake that is dense with a very tight crumb (such as a pound cake- heavy). It's important to understand the difference between baking SODA and baking POWDER, especially when you're baking with acidic ingredients.

Baking soda needs acid to bubble. Baking POWDER is a lower potency of baking soda with its own acid already mixed in to cause the reaction needed in a recipe that has no acid in it. If you used powder, there was a lack of soda in your recipe. When you mix powder with lemon juice it bubbles. It creates carbon dioxide which is what lifts your cake, making it rise. For a lemon cake, you want some baking soda in there. Acidity in the lemon juice will react with the baking soda and give the cake lift.

The golden question is how much do you need to add.

Thanks, Abby -- I wondered if the lemon was part of the problem. I have to make cupcakes for a grad party this weekend, so I'll do a plain vanilla cupcake with lemon frosting.

Yeah, that was going to be my second recommendation. You could also try adding lemon zest instead of extract or juice. That will help reduce acidity and will give you that lemon taste. Just make sure you don't grate it down to the white part- that's the pith and it's bitter.

We actually looked at Woodbury! The spot we wanted wasn't available though :/

Applesauce is a great replacement not only for oil but also for the egg in vegan recipes. We do use it in some of our apple cake recipes as a flavoring but we love our butter and oil here at Nadia Cakes (we are in the business of giving people guilty pleasures so you can't blame us!!) LOL!

Great question, Jay!

Jay, this is deep. I had to really think about this one. I think, I'm going to say creation. I love the process and being able to stand back and look at a cake or a full pastry case packed with colorful, delicious cupcakes, knowing that it's my creation. I also love the immediacy of my meduim. It has about an hour long turn around time from batter to frosted perfection so I don't have to wait long to see the fruits of my labor.

Having said all that, I should mention I'm eating a chocolate cupcake right now.

We make almost all of our 135 flavors in gluten free! Our staff under goes extensive training around how to bake and safely serve GF products. We use rice flour in our cakes and all of our frostings are naturally GF. We also make Parisian macaroons which are made onsite, from scratch and are GF as well. We serve GF every Sunday, a different flavor every week, and you can order GF any time as long as you order at least 12, 1 flavor per 12.

As for GF products, we make all of ours from scratch so we can control all our ingredients. I am aware of a GF cake mix that is available in grocery stores. You could always make your own frosting to use with it make sure it's GF. It's pretty easy to avoid gluten as long as you read the ingredients and just avoid it if you're not sure. Hope we see you on Sundays!

Oh, but I should also mention that while we do GF, we don't currently offer anything dairy free :( Our recipes contain eggs and butter.

The hardest cake we ever made was the cake we did on TLC's sho Fabulous Cake, season 2. It had over 500 handmade sugar flowers. It was a nightmare! But so worth the work :)

Pricing can be tricky. First you need to figure out how much it costs you to make your cupcakes and cakes. Next time you buy ingredients, add up the cost and divide it by how many cupcakes you get out of it to figure out how much each cupcake costs to make. Once you know that, it will help you decide how much to charge.

If you're making them just for fun, you want to break even on your supplies and you don't want to scare people away with big prices, then charge just a little more than your cost. Maybe $1.00 per cupcake. If you're trying to make some pocket money, then $2.00 a cupcake isn't at all unheard of, especially for something homemade. Cakes are harder to price because a lot of the time the cake is not so expensive to make but the labor on a custom cake can take you HOURS and you should be charging for your time. A good way to figure out cake pricing is to set a per slice price like $2.00 a slice and then charge an hourly labor fee. $10 an hour is a good safe number. So if your cake serves 10 and it takes you 2 hours to decorate, then $40 for that cake. If that doesn't sound like enough, adjust accordingly.

Just rememeber, people get what they pay for! if your cupcakes are amazing, you're baking from scratch and using great ingredients then by all means, charge what you want. If people don't see the value, they aren't the customers you want anyway. You want people to appreciate the work you put in- not buy them because they are cheap. Good luck!

We are here to stay. We love Ca but Minnesota has won our hearts. We have a great management team in CA and we are there often. In fact, Carlos and I were just there for three days last week! We chose Maple Grove because we loved the area and we LOVE the seasons. After 25 years of sun in CA, the snow (even MN winter) is a great change!

I don't have any good go to videos but I can give you some tips!

1. If using a knife to frost try dipping it in hot water. It will make smoother frosting.
2. If you're using frosting in a pastry bag, practice on a cutting board. That way when you're done you can scrape the frosting back into the bag and you won't waste frosting or ruin cupcakes while you practice. This is how we train our staff to frost!
3. If you do botch your frosting job, add an extra blob of frosting to the pile and roll the frosted part in sprinkles or crushed cookies. Just make sure you do it soon after frosting it or your frosting will form a crust and nothing will stick to it.
4. Never frost a hot cupcake!

Good luck and have fun!

Hope we see you soon, buying cupcakes!

Well, I hope after you try ours the quest for the perfect cupcake will end. They are amazing! See you in a few weeks!

Hi Emma,
See my comments to Mary about lemon cake. it can be a pain! As for the strawberry frosting, I know exactly what's happening. When strawberries touch sugar they begin to weep- and they contain a lot of water! When you put strawberry into the frosting the sugar in the frosting makes the berry release water and it will make your frosting thin and watery. This also happens when you use fresh strawberries on top of cupcakes. Unless they have some sort of glaze on them, you'll see them wilt and weep down onto the cupcake within just a few hours. This is why we never top our strawberry cupcakes with fresh strawberries. They just don't last very long.

The way we deal with this problem in our strawberry frosting at Nadia Cakes is to puree the strawberry first and then gradually add it in to the frosting, testing consistancy as you go. A little goes a long way! Then we add in some extra strawberry extract for extra kick. Don't try and fix the thin frosting problem with extra powdered sugar. It will make your frosting way too sweet!

As for the Almond Joy cupcake, when I think of that candy I think coconut, with chocolate palying a supporting role. I would probably do a coconut cake instead of chocolate and then I'd dip the top in melted chocolate and frost it with chocolate or coconut cream cheese and roll it in almonds and sweetened coconut flakes. Just play with it.

We do make salted caramel! We do a chocolate salted and a caramel salted. It's amazing!