Welcome to Food Mood with experimental cooking and ideas tried and tested by me, MacKenzie, for better or worse. Sometimes, things turn out delicious, and sometimes I forget the flour.

Making cakes with box mixes is easy. Generally, the only ingredients needed other than the mix are eggs, oil and water. I heard there are a ton of alternatives to using eggs in cooking, and I’m working my way through the list! So I made cupcakes, but instead of using eggs, I used unsweetened applesauce. I know. It sounds gross. But it’s not! It tastes the same and if you don’t use eggs, you can eat the batter! (Although everyone eats things with raw egg in them anyway. Applesauce works best in cakes and baked goods versus other egg substitutes. They make baked goods moist and soft. They look normal too! There’s so many ways to cook the same thing. It’s amazing!

And my absolute favorite thing to do with box mix: rainbow cakes. They look impressive. And hard to make. But they’re not- really. Although it is easier to make rainbow food with white food. I used a vanilla cake mix to make these:

And it was really simple and easy to do! I split the batter into a few different bowls and added food coloring. Then I layered the batter into the cupcake liners. I had purple at the bottom, then blue, green, yellow, orange and red! Rainbow food is easy to make. Anything from cheesecake to dip can be layered like this and it is an attention getter! It’s a lot of fun and really simple to do!

Food Mood is a monthly blog posting on the 1st of every month, written and created by MacKenzie Miller, experimenting and putting a new twist on baking classic American favorites.

MacKenzie Miller is junior at Shawnee Mission South, and is an active participant in Latin and the Gay Straight Alliance.

Opinions written in blogs on smsouthnews.com only reflect the opinions of the writer of the post and is not in any way the opinion of The Patriot staff as a whole.