‘The Pioneer Woman’: Ree Drummond’s Cake Mix Bars Are the Easiest Dessert Recipe
One of Ree Drummond‘s easiest dessert recipes starts with a store-bought cake mix. Her cake mix bars are so quick to whip up — they’re perfect for your next gathering or potluck.
Ree Drummond makes an easy dessert recipe with cake mix
Drummond demonstrated how to make her easy dessert recipe on an episode of The Pioneer Woman dedicated to three-ingredient dishes. “There’s never been a quicker or easier dessert than the one I am about to show you,” she teased. “Three words: cake mix bars.”
She explained, “You can change up the kind of cake mix, change up the kind of candy. You can make it all yours, change the colors — whatever you wanna do.”
Drummond put white cake mix in a bowl and added milk, eggs, and melted butter. Then she whisked everything together. She added salt to balance the sweetness, then added a combination of colorful vanilla baking morsels, rainbow sprinkles, and mini candy coated chocolate pieces.
‘The Pioneer Woman’ star praises cake mix as a perfect ingredient
Drummond shared her thoughts on using cake mix as a shortcut. “I think it was the ‘90s when cookbooks started coming out, showing people they could use boxed cake mixes to kind of make their own doctored up cakes,” she explained. “It’s such a brilliant concept because you don’t have to measure all the dry ingredients. It’s just ready to go.”
She continued, “And then everything went back to ‘we have to make everything from scratch.’”
Drummond added, “But now, thank goodness, cake mixes are back and they are happening. They are the popular kids and you guys are gonna agree with me when I pull these out of the oven. They’re so good.”
She poured the mixture into a greased cake pan and sprinkled the remaining candies over the top. “There are so many possibilities here. You can do nuts, you can do pretzels, you can do potato chips,” she said. “You can sort of do a sweet/salty thingamajig.”
She baked the dessert bars in a 350 degree Fahrenheit oven for 25 to 28 minutes and used a bench scraper to cut it into squares.
The full recipe is available on the Food Network website.
Ree Drummond uses cake mix for an easy brownies dessert recipe
Drummond also uses cake mix in a brownie recipe which makes prepping the dessert so much quicker.
In a 2014 blog post on the Pioneer Woman website, she wrote about using the store-bought ingredient. “Don’t hate. Appreciate,” she wrote. “It works so well, and you won’t even know you’re not eating brownies made with fine Scharffen Berger chocolate.”
She also offered up a warning. “If you are fundamentally and spiritually averse to things like cake mixes, you might want to avert your eyes,” she shared. “Or, if you’re feeling adventurous, just try the brownies! You might get the surprise of your life.”
The Food Network host combines chocolate cake mix and evaporated milk, adds melted butter, and stirs everything together. Drummond presses half of the mixture in a greased baking pan, adds a layer of candies, then tops it with the remaining brownie batter and bakes the dessert.
You can find the recipe on the Food Network website.
