My perfect spring cake started with a box mix

When I was nine or ten, fueled by a steady diet of the Food Network and a recent purchase of “Moneymakers: Good Cents for Girls” (a financial masterpiece from the American Girl Company), I launched my very own baking empire. It was called The Batter Bowl and it had exactly one product: chocolate chip cookies, made from a recipe my mom had gradually adapted from the back of a Nestlé bittersweet chocolate chip bag.

Armed with a stack of handmade business cards, I went door to door in our suburban Chicago cul-de-sac, pitching the neighbors: “Would you like fresh-baked cookies delivered to your doorstep every Saturday morning?” If it worked for the Girl Scouts and their nationwide empire of other young entrepreneurs, why not me?

Fridays after school and figure skating practice, I’d set out the lineup — chocolate chips, brown sugar, eggs, vanilla, Crisco — pressing the dough into fat, craggy mounds on my mom’s old cookie sheets. Once cooled, they went into crinkly cellophane bags from Party Central, each one tied with a bit of lilac curling ribbon. The next morning, I’d pile them into my wagon, its wheels scraping the sidewalk, and make my deliveries: a dozen cookies for five dollars, cash only, which I kept in a plump white envelope tucked next to my bed.

I spent a lot of time fantasizing about the brick-and-mortar bakery I’d open one day. I even scoured the real estate section of the classifieds for potential store-fronts, convinced I just had to find the listings other people overlooked. I vividly remember one late spring day, I found one — miraculously cheaper than the others, a slip of land I could afford after another summer or two of weekly cookie deliveries. I circled the ad, marched downstairs and triumphantly showed my grandfather. He studied it for a moment, then gently pointed out that I had, in fact, selected a burial plot.

By the next summer, however, The Batter Bowl shut down — not because business was bad, but because I quietly began to shy away from the world I had so confidently built for myself. Real baking wasn’t for me. Or at least that’s what I told myself. 

In reality, that was the summer puberty hit me like a truck. Practically overnight, I had to adjust to how my new glasses slid down my nose and the way the elastics tethered to my braces snapped like rubber bands in a junk drawer. My school uniform sweater suddenly bunched in ways that felt like a personal attack. Just existing was mortifying. Seeing my cute (equally zitty) neighbor collecting the mail? Excruciating. Raising my hand in class? A form of torture.

Dragging a wagon of cookies door-to-door? Forget about it. 

And then, an off-handed comment from my math teacher: After a group of us — me included — failed to grasp a concept, he coldly told us, “You won’t even get into culinary school if you don’t smarten up.” It landed like a stone in my chest. This wasn’t just a bad grade. It was the end of something. I wasn’t cut out for baking, for the kind of real baking that required precision. I wasn’t cut out for the person I was becoming. 

And so, quietly, I stepped away.

It wasn’t that I stopped cooking — I still loved it. Cooking felt loose and instinctual. I could stand at the stove, tasting, adjusting, adding a little more of this, a little less of that—always able to fix it if something went wrong. I remember the first time I made spaghetti sauce from scratch, long before I understood ratios or had any true sense of technique. I could taste the raw garlic and basil and adjust. I didn’t need a recipe; I just knew what it needed. Baking, on the other hand, felt immutable. I’d follow a recipe to the letter and still end up squinting at the oven door, trying to gauge whether I’d accidentally created something leaden or gummy or wrong.

For years, I mostly avoided it, save for a few indulgences. I learned to make babka (thank you for the inspiration, “Seinfeld”), delighting in wrangling the dough’s sticky, elastic strands into tight, glossy braids. I got into English muffins because their griddled tops hid any number of sins. I still made my mom’s chocolate chip cookies. But the idea of true, confident baking — the kind where you understand how ingredients work and why — felt completely outside my reach.

And then, about five years ago, in the early days of the pandemic, I learned to bake — sort of. Not by mastering ratios or poring over scientific explanations, but by doing something I once would have considered cheating.

I learned to bake with boxed mix.

It felt safe. The chemistry was already handled; all I had to do was play around with flavor and texture. Between Zoom happy hours and “Stardew Valley” sessions, I folded cold coffee into brownie batter, added matcha to white cake, swapped butter for oil just to see what would happen. And something clicked: I wasn’t just following recipes anymore. I was understanding them.

Which is how I landed on what I now consider the perfect spring cake: a citrus olive oil cake with a simple orange marmalade glaze. It started as a craving—a way to will a new season into existence. I was tired of winter desserts, of fudgy cakes and stewed fruits, of warm spices clinging to everything like a wool coat. I wanted a cake that felt like eating fruit in the sun, like something you’d be served on the ivy-covered patio of a neighborhood trattoria, the air thick with early summer heat. Something bright, tangy, just sweet enough.

And armed with the confidence from my boxed mix education, I began gathering ingredients. 

Cornmeal was an easy early choice. It gives cake a little grit and toastiness, a reminder that not all desserts need to be pillowy soft.. But cornmeal is also thirsty, and my first attempt — which leaned on a mixture of olive oil, melted butter and a single egg for moisture — was dry, almost crumbly. I adjusted. The second version added an extra egg. The third ditched butter entirely in favor of buttermilk, and suddenly, the texture was perfect: tender with the kind of bite that lingers for half a second before melting on your tongue.

The lemon zest was another lesson in escalation. I kept adding more, testing the limits of absurdity until I hit two full lemons’ worth — enough that it left a whisper of citrus oil on my fingertips. And sugar, I learned, wasn’t quite right. The first version of this cake used only white sugar, and it was too one-note, too cloying. Swapping in honey added moisture, yes, but also something deeper, an earthiness and floral sweetness that makes you lean in for another bite.

And then, the final piece: the glaze. Bonne Maman orange marmalade (hey, I still like a well-placed culinary cheat), melted down with lemon juice and a little sugar, brushed over the top while the cake was still warm. It gave the cake a glossy, almost shellacked finish—the kind of thing that made it look like it had been plucked straight from the window of a sun-drenched Italian bakery.

Baking was never the problem. The problem was thinking I had to get it right. But it turns out, like anything, it gets easier when you stop worrying about perfection and just start playing.

Maybe ten-year-old me had it right all along. Back then, baking wasn’t about perfection—it was about playing, creating, and trusting my instincts. Now, years later, I’m back in that same space, but with a little more understanding. The joy is still there, just like it was when I made those first craggy cookies, but now I know: baking isn’t about getting it right; it’s about the process, the freedom to experiment, and the confidence to trust myself.