And because I could not possibly eat six cakes all by myself, I enlisted the help of my wonderful BuzzFeed coworkers to participate in a blind taste test.
While I was trying all of these for the first time with everyone, the taste test wasn’t blind for me since I had to package up and serve the cakes. But since I haven’t had boxed cake in a while, I truly went in with very little preconceived notions of each brand.
Each cake was assigned the same numbers as listed above, and everyone was asked to fill out a form ranking the taste, texture, and moistness (sorry) of each cake from a scale of one (terrible) to five (amazing). The average rating was then calculated for each category, and the average of those was calculated to get an overall rating for each cake.
Although not everyone regarded themselves as a baker per se (I actually think that’s an even better perspective to have), we definitely all had A LOT of thoughts about each cake and were surprised at how different they all were. So let’s not delay this any longer and get into it.
6. Jiffy — The brand best known for its cornbread mix delivered a yellow cake with a wildly confusing texture and flavor. I believe the overall consensus here was ‘Huh?’
The baking instructions and ingredient additions for Jiffy also strayed from the others. There was no need for the addition of any fat, just one egg, and 1/2 cup cold water, and the instructions were to beat on medium speed for four whole minutes. The lack of fat really threw me off since that’s what contributes to the moisture and crumb of a cake. So no/less fat means a tighter crumb and a dry cake. Vegetable shortening was listed as ingredient, which is pretty standard for most cake mixes, but it could be that Jiffy puts more into their dry mix. I also noticed some brown specks in the batter, and that’s when I saw that flaxseeds were also listed as an ingredient. Why? I have no idea.
A couple of us compared it to angel food cake, and others found that it was reminiscent of cornbread (remember, no one knew this was Jiffy!). Ross also thought it tasted “like the frosted sugar cookies you get in the grocery store, and not in a good way.” Like those cookies, it had a very closed crumb and felt fragile, like it could easily dissolve if you dropped it in water. There was also a slight lemony aftertaste that was so off-putting and not at all what you’d expect when biting into a yellow cake.
I Conducted An Office Taste Test Of The Most Popular Boxed Cake Mixes, And The Winner Surprised Every Last One Of Us
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