Easy Cupcakes

Duncan Hines Moist Deluxe red velvet cake mix
Finally, someone has brought red velvet cupcakes to the masses. That someone is Duncan Hines, with a Moist Deluxe Red Velvet cake mix that’s not stocked in all supermarkets and thus is rather hard to find. You may be used to delicious $3 cupcakes from cake shops brimming with velvety taste and eye-popping redness, topped off with a sinful cream cheese frosting. If that’s what you need to get your red velvet cupcake fix, this box mix may not be for you. Duncan Hines makes a valiant effort to duplicate the classic favorite with this “premium cake mix,” but in the end it is what it is: a boxed cake mix. Don’t get us wrong; we at Easycupcakes.com love the boxed mixes and canned frosting, because they’re simple to use and a means to an end: setting the stage for cleverly decorated cupcakes. So, on that level, we enjoyed the Duncan Hines mix. We’re not the types to spend hours in the kitchen and blow through two bottles of red dye to get our batch of red velvets. We’ll leave that to the updown girls.

Betty Crocker Cupcake Mix
What better way to jump on the cupcake bandwagon than to produce and package special cupcake mix? Oh, wait. Cake mix is cupcake mix. Someone forgot to tell the folks at Betty Crocker, who have come out with a mix that will make a whopping 12 cupcakes (compared to the 18 to 24 you’ll get from a regular box of cake mix.) So, of course, the cupcake mix must cost less, right? Not necessarily. OK, we’re being mean. It is a cute idea, and the thing that makes the cupcake mix different from the cake mix (besides the size) is that Betty Crocker has kindly slipped a dozen paper liners for your muffin tins right into the box. We stand corrected. It’s a great idea we couldn’t pass up. We tried the devil’s food and it was devilishly good. Still, we’d rather stick with the 18.25 ounces of a standard cake mix box rather than the 9.1 ounces in the cupcake mix–even with the liners.