Why would anyone use mix for basic yellow cake?

It's literally the simplest kind of cake to make, and doesn't really even need sifting or cake flour, and there's none of the stuff that makes other cakes hard (separating eggs, mucking with melting chocolate* or heating the milk for cocoa powder.) The only way to screw it up from scratch is to over-beat it, and that's the exact same way you can screw up the mix.

It's about an extra 3 minutes with electric beaters for scratch over mix, plus however long it takes you to measure out the flour and baking powder.

(* although this is one thing where a microwave is truly a wonderful thing... after all the complaining about double boilers from my mom, I just melt it in a pyrex dish in the microwave, easy.)

Both keep for years if kept dry in sealed containers (and not like vaccuum, just screw-top), so that's hard to imagine. Then again, I'm definitely of the sort where "food" and "bread" are synonyms.

Not a lot of kitchen storage space or counter space.

I see this often on food-related forums and it always annoys me: someone creates a thread to ask for opinions about commercial products (what's the best yellow cake mix/jarred giardiniera/store-bought spaghetti sauce/frozen Chinese dumpling/dry pasta/boxed chicken broth/whatever, and someone eventually, invariably, replies "it's so easy, why don't you make it yourself?" That's a useful answer to "how hard is this to make myself?" It's not a useful answer to "I can't or don't want to make this myself; what's your favorite commercial brand?"

There are very few things easy enough I make them from scratch, but simple yellow cake is one of them.

Short of really crappy "just add water" mixes, the process of making up the mix is literally 90% of the work of making it from scratch. It's kind of like bread machine mixes for plain white bread, where the mix literally saves you only measuring out a little bit of salt and flour.

The funny thing is, I actually prefer the chocolate cake made by Costco and many supermarkets to any home made, or home made from mix, that I have ever had. I know it's from a mix and probably loaded with unhealthy "stuff" but as rarely as I partake, it doesn't matter to me. I'm not a big fan of yellow cake, but I imagine it would be the same for that too. Yes, this drives my wife insane, as she loves to bake.

Perhaps, but you need to establish whose opinions you want to elicit. There can't be many food lovers who would countenance making a cake from a box of chemicals when it's so easy, and common, in Western cultures to do it yourself and the outcome is so hugely better (in terms of taste, freshness and avoidance of nasty substances). So, if you eliminate food lovers from your responses, then why would you rely on any of the answers?

Elicit? Why people who have answers to this: If you had to choose a widely-available yellow cake mix as a base for something, which brand would you choose? Avoid? Why?

If I wanted to find out about making the cake from scratch, I would have asked such a question.

And sometimes, you just want a box of chemicals that is pre-measured, easy to make, without having to buy my own other ingredients, many of which will eventually go stale on the shelf.

I live in the land of local, organic, sustainable, blah blah blah and eat a lot of it, but sometimes you just need a box of easy to prepare chemicals. Accordingly, that is why I asked for recommendations for "favo(u)rite box of easy to prepare chemicals."

Ironically, the party I brought it to had several bakers/pastry chefs and they liked what I did with it (filled with homemade mango and lemon preserves and fresh whipped cream). Yes, I whipped the cream myself. I even added the sugar and vanilla.

Lest we forget, I grew up in the era of Ritz Mock Apple Pie. Yellow Cake Mix is a veritable bounty of wholesomeness in comparison.

Speaking generally about cake mix, I've had the best luck with the Betty Crocker Supermoist, and the worst with Pillsbury (which tends to have very "fake tasting" flavors to my palate.)

Flour and sugar go stale over several years. Baking powder and salt don't go stale, they last decades as long as they're kept dry.

Milk, butter and eggs all go bad fairly quickly, but you want to have all three when making a cake from a box anyway (and need the last; I use milk and melted butter instead of water and cooking oil with most mixes, as it produces a richer cake and I've got it around anyway.)

YMMV, but this really seems like a case of pre-shaped burger patties to me. There are definitely cakes which are enough easier to make from mix to be worth it, but this is the simplest of the simple. It's not even labor intensive -- apple pie filling, for example, is pretty much the world's simplest recipe (apples, sugar to taste, cinammon to taste, done) but hides a lot of work in peeling and cutting apples.

This. ^

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cblaisd
Co-Moderator, Dining Buzz

As a gift to some university friends to see them through the long long summer holiday without me, I gave them 'cake mix' (it was a phenomenon that really didn't exist where we lived, so what I did was measure out all the dry ingredients they needed to make the cakes that I cooked for them the rest of the year and seal them in Ziploc bags, with the 'additional ingredients' (butter and egg) written on the bag, along with how to cook it. Every single one of them was a science undergrad, but the thought of weighing things in the kitchen was beyond them!

Before this thread cake making really wasn't a part of my daily interest, but I thought I'd buy a few cake mixes to see what they were like. First I bought a cheap Waitrose sponge cake mix and whipped some thick cream and some chopped up fresh strawberries and made a sort of Victoria Sponge - and it was really good. I have also tried some other mixes .... today a toffee cake mix. What I liked about using a premix is that you can take just a 100gms of mix and scale down the water and oil and make a couple of fresh muffins in around 20 to 30 minutes or so. I like the idea of just making wifey and me a muffin size cake each and premixes seem to me to be a perfectly acceptable method.

I have convinced wifey to get stuck into scratch cake making and bought her the Mary Berry book, but mean time a daily muffin sized cake is a nice idea.

Thanks to the OP for sowing the seeds of my muffin stuffings.

Chocolate mug cake was born to be made by those wanting an instant cake fix! Tons of recipes out there if you find yourself short of cake mixes!