I Conducted An Office Taste Test Of The Most Popular Boxed Cake Mixes, And The Winner Surprised Every Last One Of Us
“It tasted like a wet sponge that had been left in the Sahara Desert to dry.”
Truth be told, I wasn’t always a baker and, like a lot of people, was vehemently against something that had little room for error. So before I was whipping up homemade layer cakes and loaves of bread, boxed cake mixes were my go-to. I’ve always been a huge advocate for ready-to-make and easy desserts — you don’t need a stand mixer and hundreds of dollars worth of ingredients to bake. Plus, in my 27 years of life, I’ve never once seen someone complain about getting a Funfetti cake on their birthday.
Since we’re officially in holiday mad-dash mode and you probably have enough to worry about without thinking of dessert, I wanted to go ahead and try out different boxed cake mixes to find which one would stand out (and save you the holiday baking stress). Here are the six brands I grabbed.
For the sake of this test and to keep things even across the board, I went with yellow cake since it’s kind of the gold standard (pun intended) boxed cake and comes with less variation than other flavors, like chocolate. Not that it matters, but I want to point out how HILARIOUS I found the way competing brands emphasized how “moist” their cakes were (moist supreme, perfectly moist, super moist…I love it). Anyway, here are the brands:
1. Pillsbury Moist Supreme Yellow Cake Mix ($1.27)
2. Jiffy Golden Yellow Cake Mix ($0.98)
3. Whole Foods Classic Yellow Cake Mix ($3.29)
4. Duncan Hines Perfectly Moist Classic Yellow Cake Mix ($1.38)
5. Betty Crocker Super Moist Yellow Cake Mix ($1.69)
6. Trader Joe’s Yellow Cake and Baking Mix ($2.99)
Each cake was cooked exactly according to their respective package instructions which, surprisingly, did vary (we’ll get into that in a bit). Most of them made two 8-inch round cakes or one 9×13-inch sheet cake with the exception of Jiffy, which only made one 8-inch round cake…
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