One of my favorite pastimes is perusing the aisles of specialty food stores like Williams-Sonoma or Sur La Table and checking out all the gourmet foods and food mixes. From soup starters to simmering sauces to dessert mixes and more, there's a seemingly endless supply of items that promise to make your life easier by including many of the ingredients you'd need to make a dish so that you don't have to purchase them individually. These products all sound fantastic, but they can be pricey, and I always wonder if they're worth it. Well, I thought I'd put some of these products to the test in this new monthly feature where I'll be purchasing and making an item each month and letting you know if it's up to snuff. Along the way, I'm hoping we can all discover some products to make our lives easier, but I'll also be sure to let you know if I don't think a product is all it's cracked up to be.
First up is the Barefoot Contessa Red Velvet Cupcake & Cream Cheese Frosting Mix. I've long been a fan of Ina Garten. Ok, "fan" is an understatement - I'm obsessed. I own all of her cookbooks, record her TV shows, and whenever I host a dinner party or bring a dish to an event, it's pretty much guaranteed that each and every recipe will have come from Ina. Her recipes are by no means low fat (I mean, c'mon, they all start with a stick of butter), and she often calls for far too much salt and/or oil, but the end result is consistently spectacular and, other than a coconut macaroon debacle in 2006, I've never had trouble following one of her recipes.
So of course when I discovered the Barefoot Contessa line of pre-packaged mixes I was intrigued. Anything from Ina had to be good, right? But then again, could Ina successfully be relegated to a box? I decided to find out when I picked up a box of the Red Velvet Cupcake & Cream Cheese Frosting Mix while browsing the shelves of Crate & Barrell on a rainy afternoon. At $12, it wasn't cheap, but I figured if it was Ina, it had to be worth a shot. I picked up some eggs, butter (it's an Ina recipe after all) and cream cheese and I was ready to go. Note - a really nice touch with these mixes is that they state right on them what you'll need to purchase separately in order to make the mix. That way you not only can estimate how much money you'll need to spend in addition to the cost of the mix, but you also won't be caught in the unfortunate situation of starting to cook and realizing you don't have a necessary ingredient.
Describing this mix, the Barefoot Contessa website declares: "Deliciously festive, moist, and flavorful, the southern Americana classic, red velvet cake, gets a little twist from the Barefoot Contessa to create an instant party favorite that will be enjoyed by all." Well, I didn't serve the cupcakes at a party, but I can say these homemade treats were better than any red velvet cupcake I've ever purchased - and I live in cupcake-crazed NYC, home of such purveyors as Magnolia Bakery, Crumbs and Buttercup Bakeshop. The top had just the right amount of crispness, and the bottom part was moist and delicious. And of course, the cream cheese frosting was divine.
What's more is that this mix was a joy to make with my 3-year-old daughter Sadie, who adores "red velup" cupcakes. Sadie delighted as we added the egg to the mix and the entire concoction turned a bright red (due to the only ingredient in the mix that gave me pause - artificial food coloring, but I figured a little bit once in a while isn't so bad). I loved that the dry ingredients were pre-mixed, making the mess factor when cooking with a toddler much lower. I showed Sadie how to transfer the batter to the prepared muffin tin (lined with cupcake wrappers) using an ice cream scoop, which she found hilarious (she hasn't yet grasped the idea of objects being useful for more than one purpose), before transferring the cupcakes to the oven. The recommended baking time on the package was right on, which I appreciated, and the cupcakes emerged from the oven looking absolutely perfect.
As the cupcakes cooled, I prepared the frosting by combining the included Frosting Mix with an entire package of cream cheese and yet more butter. At this point, Sadie had lost interest in the project and was playing with her LEGOs in the other room. Once the cupcakes had completely cooled, I used an icing spatula to spread the frosting on top of them, and was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to replicate the way the cupcakes looked on the box. Indeed, the finished product was a stunning visual masterpiece and I was quite pleased with myself over how professional my cupcakes looked! As I snapped a few pictures for posterity (who knows when or if I'd ever be able to replicate this frosting perfection?), Sadie and my husband kept poking their heads in the kitchen to ask if it was time to taste test the cupcakes. Finally, the big moment arrived. I presented Sadie with her perfectly frosted cupcake, and she proceeded to go head-first into it, getting it all over her face, hair and arms as she licked every last bit of frosting off of the cupcake. If that's not a sign of approval, I don't know what is!
The verdict? These cupcakes are absolutely delicious. I don't know that you save any money by buying the mix versus purchasing the individual ingredients at the grocery store, but I suspect the cost would be about the same if you didn't happen to have most of the ingredients on hand. For me, it was well worth the convenience of having everything packaged together and having a single pouch to deal with rather than measuring out the ingredients made the mix much easier to prepare with my toddler. One advantage to making the cupcakes from scratch would be that you could substitute beet juice for the artificial food coloring called for in Ina's recipe and used in the Barefoot Contessa mix, so that's definitely something to consider. For more information on the Red Velvet Cupcake & Cream Cheese Frosting Mix and other Barefoot Contessa products, visit the Barefoot Contessa website.
