One August afternoon at an antique store in Downeast Maine, I was flipping through a box of old print advertisements when a Bisquick ad from the 1960s stopped me in my tracks. A photo of the back of a Bisquick box listed recipes for things like pancakes, biscuits and shortcake, but most memorably, a coffee cake that called for Bisquick in its batter and crumb topping. The ingredient list confused me — just two tablespoons of sugar and a single egg in the entire cake? But the directions were truly shocking: “Beat vigorously half min.” Every baker knows the cardinal rule of cake making is to mix your batter as little and gently as possible to avoid developing too much gluten in it. I left the poster behind and drove home to New York, but never stopped wondering about that weird-sounding cake. I’ve eaten thousands of pancakes courtesy of Bisquick in my life, but never considered what else it might be capable of. What if Bisquick was a hack for coffee cake the same way boxed cake mix is for crinkle cookies? So this week, I finally made it.
Nothing about baking the Bisquick coffee cake was fun. I reluctantly turned my stand mixer to medium speed to beat the useless amount of sugar, one egg, milk, and powdery mix together for 30 long, sacrilegious seconds. I winced watching the floury streaks disappear, the delicate batter morph into a gummy, glue-like paste. That should have been enough to deter me from dunking my finger into it, but tasting cake batter is one of the joys of baking, so I went ahead and did it anyway. The sour, chemical aftertaste of baking soda lingered for an uncomfortably long time. But the crumb topping was promising! Made from equal parts brown sugar and Bisquick with a little cinnamon and half of a stick of butter, it tasted pretty delicious, but didn’t quite crumble over the batter the way the directions implied it would.
Unsurprisingly, the whole thing baked — at the bizarrely high temperature of 400 degrees, for 20 minutes — into a crumbly dome that reminded me more of a sponge than a cake. It lacked any sweetness at all, but once again, the topping gave me hope. Some sections baked into thin, crispy bubbles that shattered under my teeth, while the others sunk into pools of gooey cinnamon sugar. Slicing, scraping, and spooning those parts off was actually pretty enjoyable.
But tragically, even the crumb topping turned on me. A day later, those pleasantly crunchy spots seemed to have absorbed some moisture (from where, I have no clue) and transformed into a wet and soggy blanket over the “cake.” Once those caramelized, textured parts were gone, I was left with a bready layer that had the floury taste of a biscuit but none of the rich, luxurious, buttery qualities of one. (Reminder: the cake called for barely any fat at all.) After that, it met its fate: my trash.
Versions of this recipe live online in a few different places, all of them with dozens of four- and five-star reviews. Scrolling through the comment sections, though, I realized the reviewers weren’t rating the same coffee cake I had baked. Lots of them add oil, applesauce and sour cream to the batter and a few mention folding in diced apples or berries. Almost everyone recommends doubling the topping recipe — one person even suggests scoring the batter so the topping can ripple through the cake to prevent it from turning out “a bit dry and floury tasting.” Any of these adjustments would probably make the cake slightly more edible, but I think I’ll stick to using the rest of my box of Bisquick to make pancakes and finally stop thinking about that recipe. I’m glad I left it where it belonged all along — in a dusty box in Maine.
Gaby Scelzo is a baker, writer, and New Yorker.
