Welcome to Snapshot Cooking, the home of Kitchn's easiest recipes. These mini recipes are so simple you can practically cook from the before-and-after snapshot itself.
We'll be the first to tell you that we love a good ambitious and elaborate from-scratch baking project. But we can also absolutely appreciate super-easy, fool-proof desserts — especially when we're short on time, money, oven space, or all of the above.
And that's where our love for Trader Joe's baking mixes comes in. They're inexpensive, and their fun, ever-changing lineup — which ranges from Cinnamon Sugar Coffee Cake to Brownie Truffle — makes even cult-favorite mixes such as red velvet seem boring. (And no, we're not paid to say this.)
The only thing better than baking one of these straight-up is combining it with our new favorite cake-baking technique: slow cooking. Unlike your oven, the slow cooker traps moisture inside and provides an even heat, leaving you with moist and tender cakes that are almost impossible to mess up. Plus, it frees up your oven for whatever's for dinner, and lets you go about your evening without constantly peering into the oven.
Trader Joe's cake mixes are usually smaller than other grocery store brands, often yielding just one 8x8-inch cake. Instead of calling for multiple boxes and having you bake a cake directly in your slow cooker insert (which puts you at risk for burned edges, and is tricky to remove and serve), we opted to bake most of these cakes in smaller vessels within the slow cooker. To keep the vessels from sitting directly on the insert, we employed a technique we picked up from our friends at Real Simple: placing them on a rack made from foil.
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