Duncan Hines icing (left) versus home made butter cream icing (right)
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We have never really understood the market for canned cake frosting when you can make butter cream icing from scratch using real ingredients in about 30 seconds. OK, chocolate frosting takes 90 seconds because you have to melt the chocolate in the microwave.
To make homemade butter cream icing, you combine 1 stick of butter with a 1 pound box of confectioners sugar in a food processor, pulse until smooth and add a few tablespoons of milk. To make chocolate butter cream icing, melt 3 squares of baking chocolate in a microwave for about 90 seconds and blend into the frosting.
Since you continually find recipes that suggest using canned icing with a straight face, we decided to compare them. Using the Easy Chocolate Cake recipe above, we made 48 miniature cupcakes and iced half of them with homemade butter cream icing and half with Duncan Hines Creamy Home-Style Classic Chocolate purchased at Stop and Shop. (Note that the container does not call this preparation "icing" or "frosting.")
Tasting the Duncan Hines we found its initial impression was "not bad," but that there was a distinct aftertaste. Comparing the two visually as shown in the photo above, the Duncan Hines had a sort of supernatural sheen that you would not find in any real butter cream icing. (Seven minute boiled icings do shine like that but are quite a different type of icing.)
To compare these two icings, we took them to a group of about 25 singers rehearsing for a show and asked them to try both cupcakes and tell us which icing they preferred without giving any information on which was which. Some immediately remarked that the darker colored canned icing must have been made with dark chocolate and thought it would be the richer one. However on tasting the two cupcakes all but one singer preferred the homemade icing. More to the point, the cupcakes with the homemade icing disappeared much more rapidly than those iced with the canned icing.
In terms of chocolate flavor, the homemade icing had 3 oz of chocolate in the overall icing batch and tasted more chocolaty than the canned icing, even though the canned icing was made to be darker in color. This is apparently a reverse Green Eggs and Ham effect.
In terms of health concerns, the Duncan Hines frosting contains 1.5 g of trans-fats per 2 Tb, while butter contains none.
So, in conclusion, this blind test validates our theory that home made icing tastes better and is so easy to make that there is no reason to ever buy canned icing.
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Comments
You must've had some pretty happy singers! Great article.
I use both, but agree it is easy to make icing from scratch. However, I find the box icing sugar is rather lumpy and requires sifting which makes the process more time-consuming.
Your sifting point is a good one, especially if you use a mixer, but a food processor does a pretty good job of chopping up the lumps.
I love this article. I'm an icing snob, and would never use canned frosting -- so I'm glad it tested superior!
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