What do you do to mixes to make them taste better? Any kind of baking mixes, muffins, cakes, bread, biscuits.... For example, I just read that if you add cheese and garlic to carbsense buttery biscuit mix it helps them out. Any other ideas out there for the convenience baker to get that nice baking smell and do something with the product other than feed the birds with it? Which is what I end up doing when they're not worth the carbs or calories. I have huge birds around here now! Pretty soon the Boston Globe is going to have sightings of pterydactyl-sized seagulls.

I have made the Atkins fudge brownie mix a few times. I find the mix far too fakey sweet and not chocolatey enough, so I add unsweetened cocoa to it. I also add melted butter to make it richer (and to moisten the added cocoa) and lots and lots of walnuts. It comes out pretty well.

Thanks for the tip, NYorker. I had the same feeling about the taste of the mix, but just didn't know how to help it. But it looks like logic, and baking courage, are the keys. It's just hard for me to deviate from the "recipe", but most of these mixes need help.

Baking courage? Bahahaha. More like baking foolhardiness. I have NO idea what I'm doing.

You should have tasted the repulsive thing I made last night attempting to make my first cheesecake. Ye gods it was bad.

Well, call it what you will. But I admire it. It seems that the people I know who are real cooks are not paralyzed with fear of failure and are able to get over their boo boos and gulp them down or toss them in the trash and move on. I really have a fear of going outside the mix directions, which is ironically the only time I am unable to do so. The rest of my personal and professional life is drawn out of the lines 90% of the time and yet I do just fine. Just got to transfer that to cooking.

I have found that if you add an extra 1/4 cup oil to all of the Atkins muffin mixes, the texture improves greatly. I also combine plain bake mixes(Atkins & Carbsense ZerCarb) instead of just using one. If low, low carbs aren't an issue, you might try substituting 1/3 whole wheat flour or oat flour for 1/3 of the mix. I do this w/the pancake mixes and it vastly improves the end result. Be sure & adjust the carb counts, tho.

kywoman: making mix hybrids even! You really know no baking bounds. Maybe if I set out for an experiment day and have some various mixes assembled I'll be able to pull it off. I really am a by-the-book girl. But I can change.