If You Have Powdered Lemonade And A Box Of Cake Mix, You Have Dessert

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Lemonade mix can make far more than just a pitcher of lemonade. With a little culinary creativity, alternative uses for powdered drink mixes can reignite your home-baking passion and stoke your sweet tooth in a single swoop. Thanks to this innocuous pantry staple, there's a one-step way to capture the bright flavor foodies expect from their favorite lemony desserts. All it takes is a sprinkle of powdered lemonade drink mix. 

This dessert hack takes a page from our pink lemonade sheet cake recipe, which gets its flavor and rosy hue from frozen pink lemonade concentrate. For a quick upgrade to your dry boxed cake mixes, simply whisk a packet of powdered lemonade into the dry ingredients before folding in the eggs and oil, or any other additional ingredients called for in the package directions. Then, bake the cake as normal, and you're all set.  

As always, feel free to adjust the exact ingredient ratios to suit your taste preference. But, as a jumping-off point, somewhere between 3 tablespoons and ½ cup of powdered lemonade is the right amount per 15-ounce box of dry cake mix. The more lemonade powder you add, the more pronounced its flavor will be. Individual envelopes of lemonade powder work just as well here as scoops from a larger canister of Country Time lemonade mix.

To really let that lemony flavor shine, use this powdered lemonade hack in tandem with a white or yellow cake mix. Here at Tasting Table, Duncan Hines is our go-to brand of store-bought yellow cake mix for its light yet ultra-moist texture and prominent vanilla flavor. Plus, on Amazon, it's just $1.49 per box. Bonus points if you add a teaspoon of freshly-grated lemon zest into the mix for even sunnier lemon flavor.

Prefer a made-from-scratch cake? You can still use this lemonade powder hack to enhance your homemade recipes, like this classic white cake recipe: Just whisk a packet of powder in with your dry ingredients and bake away. For a dimensional, aesthetically-pleasing decoration, you could coat your lemonade-spiked cake with tangy buttercream frosting, then layer it with an elegant garnish of candied lemon peels and fresh rosemary sprigs or sage leaves. Not only do these yellow and green toppings look fabulous, but they also enhance the cake with notes of tangy, herbaceous flavor for more dimensionality on the palate. Or, you could opt for a smatter of dark, sophisticated Luxardo cherries instead. Cherry-lemon is a tough-to-beat flavor combo. 

This powdered drink mix cake hack also works with Kool-Aid. A box of plain white cake mix makes a prime candidate for taking on all the fruity, technicolor tones that folks remember from the nostalgic drink. Since Kool-Aid cake is inherently so bold, keep the garnish relatively simple: An all-over vanilla frosting with lots of rainbow sprinkles works fabulously.