The way I am coming across cupcakes around the internet these days, you'd never think that the cupcake craze was on its wane. In fact, while I know that cupcakes started in the home kitchen, they gained popularity as little luxuries in bakeries, but now, I believe the fad has nutated back into the home kitchen.

Not content to losing business to amateur bakers, Sprinkles Cupcakes has come out with a cupcake mix. It's expensive at $14, but for a dozen cupcakes, that's still cheaper than buying 12 cupcakes from Sprinkles' case.

Food blogger Triple Creme bought a canister as gift, and reports that the canister contains the mix, the retro/modern decorations (little dots), and a recipe for frosting (which she posts). Bree tried making the frosting first and says that it was good, then later tried making the cupcakes. She says, "They were very good, and easy to make," but were "not any better than other chocolate cake recipes I have tried."

A quality homemade cake is going to trump a cake mix cake every time, but that doesn't necessarily mean that cake mixes are never worth using. After all, they are quick, easy and inexpensive -- a tough combination to beat. In a recent issue, Cook's Country collected eight different brands of cake mix to see if any could come close to homemade.

They were quick to point out that none of their testers were fooled by the store-mix cakes, easily identifying the unusually uniform crumb and the ultra-fluffy texture that is created by the emulsifiers and other additives in the ingredients. Even so, five out of the eight mixes were still recommended: Betty Crocker Super Moist Butter Recipe Yellow Cake, Betty Crocker Super Moist Golden Vanilla Cake, Pillsbury Moist Supreme Classic Yellow Cake, Betty Crocker Super Moist Yellow Cake and Duncan Hines Moist Deluxe Butter Recipe Golden Cake. While the textures and colors of the winning cakes varied slightly from mix to mix, all had nice butter and vanilla flavors that make them worth eating, and only a very minimal (if any) artificial-ness to their flavor.

The cake mixes that didn't make the cut were panned by tasters for both poor texture and "insipid, stale" flavors. If you're going to buy a cake mix, stick with one of the brands above and avoid Duncan Hines Moist Deluxe Classic Yellow Cake ("a 'spongy Twinkie' "), Jiffy Golden Yellow Cake Mix ("dry and terrible") and King Arthur Flour Vanilla-Butter Cake Mix ("grainy, crumbly ... strong almond extract aftertaste").

I wouldn't have guessed that Ina Garten was a cake-mix kind of gal, but I suppose that once you have your own line of boxed mixes, your perspective probably changes somewhat. Ina's Barefoot Contessa mix line includes brownie and cake mixes, frostings, fillings and even a pie crust mix. The mixes aren't entirely new, but this is the first time that I've seen so many of them, so perhaps their original distribution was limited to a few specialty stores.

The appeal of Ina's recipes is that she manages to make them look better, as well as more indulgent, than anything you could get at a bakery. The fact that her famous coconut cupcakes are now in a box... makes them lose a little something, especially since they claim to come with a cream cheese frosting mix, to which you have to add cream cheese.

Products like sauces and preserves make sense, since even if Ina isn't in the kitchen making them by hand, you can feel confident that it is her recipe. But to convert one of her cakes into a mix really looses the homemade appeal, which is what made Ina a success in the first place.

When Alanna sent me a note to let me know about a Lifehacker post on making low-fat cupcakes, I knew I would have to give it a try out of sheer curiosity. After all, Lifehacker is not exactly a food oriented site and to take a break from their regularly scheduled content to mention cooking seemed to be a sign that their technique was worth trying. Notice that I said technique and not recipe.

These light cupcakes are sort of a food hack (or a diet hack) using two ingredients: cake mix and diet soda. If you're not curious, or are so put off by the ingredients that you don't want to hear how the cupcakes turned out, you may as well stop now. Otherwise, read on...

Is your repertoire of desserts not colorful enough? Longing for something to dazzle your eyes as much as - or perhaps more than - your taste buds? Take a peek at this blue cake found on Flickr. Those multi-colored bits that resemble pebbles are, in fact, pebbles. They are Fruity Pebbles, to be exact, and are a sorely under-utilized component in making brightly colored cakes. Note that there appear to be pebbles inside the cake as well as on top, which means that there may very well be a bit of crunch to each slice. The secret ingredient to turn the cake such a lovely teal shade is none other than 100% natural Smurf. Just kidding. It's only food coloring. We don't advocate the senseless slaughter of defenseless Smurfs here at Slashfood - not even to color cakes.

Oh, and by the way, Happy April Fool's Day!