Making cakes from scratch has its advantages

According to Workman, the publishers of Anne Byrn's "The Cake Mix Doctor" series, 90 percent of home cooks use packaged cake mixes. So this article is for the 10 percent who might actually go through the trouble of baking a cake from scratch.

The cake-mix proponents will try to talk you out of it. Cake mixes are cheaper than "scratch" cakes, they will argue - and they are often right, especially if you are extravagant enough insist on real butter and chocolate, or pure vanilla extract, for your confections. Cake mixes, they will say, give you a more consistently reliable product than scratch cakes. Right again. But baking a cake from scratch gives you control over the quality of all the ingredients, from the flour to the flavorings. It gives you a vast canon of cake recipes from which to choose. Most of all, it gives you the satisfaction of being able to say, "I baked it myself."

Lauren Chattman, the author of "Cake Keeper Cakes" (2009 The Taunton Press), is well aware of that particular sense of satisfaction. In the introduction to her delicious book, she says that since receiving a glass-domed cake keeper as a gift, she keeps it filled with cake "at all times."

Since beginning this practice, she says she noticed that more friends just "happen" to be passing by. She noticed that her kitchen has never looked "prettier or more inviting." She noticed that she developed a repertoire of some 100 recipes - from a simple lemon cake to a polenta-grape-and-olive-oil cake - that fit every occasion from a special birthday to a rainy Tuesday.

If you are going to go to the trouble of making a cake from scratch, you will probably want it to appeal to a wide variety of people, from sugar-loving children to more sophisticated adults, from traditionalists to experimental types. The chocolate upside-down cake, below, fits the bill. It has the "comfort food" vibe of a traditional upside-down cake, but with a chocolate twist. It has a gooey topping (not to mention bananas!) that will appeal to kids as well as adults. It has the added advantage of being quick and relatively easy.

Kind of like a cake mix.

• Marialisa Calta is the author of "Barbarians at the Plate: Taming and Feeding the American Family" (2005 Perigee). More at marialisacalta.com.