Barefoot Contessa's Chocolate Cupcake & Peanut Butter Frosting Mix Review

January 14, 2009

I’ve been curious about Barefoot Contessa’s Chocolate Cupcake & Peanut Butter Frosting Mix for a while now. I prefer to bake from scratch but in a pinch, having a boxed mix to fall back on can be really helpful. My standbys are Betty Crocker’s Super Moist Cake Mixes which fulfill their promise of producing super moist cakes. However, the photos on BC’s mixes have taunted me for some time so I finally gave in and tried one.

I’ll start with the good: the icing is awesome. It is so smooth and super peanut buttery. I’m pretty sure I could eat it by the jar.

The not great: The cake was a little dry for my taste. I think that there are a fair amount of people out there that make a dense or dry chocolate cake on purpose when pairing it with peanut butter frosting. This way the cake is a bed that can hold up to the dense, strong peanut butter flavor and texture. The bites I took with both cake and icing were good (not great), but on it’s own I just wasn’t crazy about the cake. Cupcakes need to be moist!

But mmm, that icing!

Ina also has a recipe for Chocolate Cupcakes with Peanut Butter Icing on Food Network. It might not be exactly the same as the mix, but according to the reviews, the icing is excellent. So maybe skip the mix and make your own chocolate cake with Ina’s peanut butter icing recipe. That’s what I’ll be doing next time, anyway.

On the bright side, I’ve been told that her Brownie Mix is very good, so I may still give her other mixes a chance!