Reply #2: I occasionally bring home made treats

[SheilaT]

to work to share with my fellow employees. Cakes or cookies or brownies or apple cake or various other things like that. I love to bake, and I live alone, and I'm appreciative that they will help consume the things I enjoy making. It's clear to me that very few people have had truly home-made goodies, made completely from scratch by they way they respond. I don't use mixes of any kind, just sugar, flour, eggs, vanilla, whatever else the recipe calls for.

Because I've consistently baked from scratch most of my life (ask me about the time I'd volunteered to make Valentine's Day treats for my older son's class when he was in grade school and they told me I had to make cupcakes from cherry-flavored mix and how appalled I was at that) and I can tell you that things made from the mixes have a distinct chemical flavor that is quite unpleasant, Unfortunately, a lot of people are used to that flavor, and when they have the real thing they cannot believe how good it is.

When my mother turned 80, I baked a couple of cakes for the party we had for her. If you were there, you had the choice of chocolate cake with white frosting, or chocolate cake with chocolate frosting. The recipe is the one on the back of the Hershey's cocoa box. I can assure you that every single person who took a slice of cake ate the entire thing. That doesn't happen with cake made from a commercial mix and frosted with the ghastly canned frosting. Oh, and it takes maybe five minutes longer to make from scratch than to use a mix.