I Conducted An Office Taste Test Of The Most Popular Boxed Cake Mixes, And The Winner Surprised Every Last One Of Us

 

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…

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.

Fresh egg delivery

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