This Burst Of Fresh Flavor Will Make Your Store-Bought Frosting Taste Homemade

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Making a cake is hard work. But while that sometimes means settling for store-bought frosting, it doesn't have to mean settling for store-bought flavor. While there are plenty of acceptable pre-made frostings out there, most suffer from a less decadent texture and duller flavor compared to what you can make at home. The great thing is that with just a few simple hacks, you can get store-bought frosting much closer to that homemade taste and texture without having to start from scratch, providing the best of both worlds. You can add extra butter to store-bought frosting to help boost its taste and texture. And, if the flavor still needs a bit more help, all you need is a little mint extract.

Like other bright ingredients, including lemon juice and vinegar, mint extract can wake up a recipe and all the flavors that are already in it. You don't have to make your frosting taste completely like mint, but a dab of extract will make everything taste a bit fresher, and also add some depth and complexity that most store-bought frostings are lacking. While mint is not acidic like lemon juice, it can have the same enlivening effect on flavor, waking up your taste buds with a pop of freshness that pre-made frosting just doesn't have.

What's great is that mint as a flavor complements fruit, vanilla, and a good store-bought chocolate frosting as well. There just aren't many cake ingredients that it won't work with.

Whether you want the mint flavor to shine through in your frosting or be a background player, you want a light touch when dealing with extract. For a standard-sized tub of frosting, start with as little as ⅛ of a teaspoon of a store-bought mint extract like McCormick. Remember, you can always add a little more if you want, but you can't take it away. If you want a stronger mint flavor, you can start with a quarter teaspoon.

There are so many great cake recipes that could benefit from a little mint. Chocolate cakes are the most obvious, but adding mint extract to vanilla frosting that is used on chocolate-flavored cakes is also a great, unexpected choice. Just think about how an undertone of mint could liven up a red velvet cake. Mint is also a great pairing with fresh berries, so a chocolate raspberry or strawberry cake with mint-infused icing will be wonderful.

If you are going with a more white or yellow cake, think about mint in recipes that combine vanilla icing with other bright flavors. A citrus loaf or coconut cake topped with vanilla icing will take on a whole new dimension with added mint flavor. Really, any cake that uses tropical flavors, like pineapple, banana, or mango, is an ideal candidate to spruce up with mint extract. It'll be good enough to make you forget the frosting isn't homemade.