Yellow cake mix
 

If you had to choose a widely-available yellow cake mix as a base for something, which brand would you choose? Avoid? Why?

We personally like Pillsbury Moist Supreme Classic: http://www.pillsburybaking.com/produ...ic-yellow-1294

Very moist.... and very forgiving if overbaked a bit in the oven. Always moist.

I do not like generic or store brand items when baking.

I generally won't use generic/store brand items when baking either. That said, I've not noticed a huge difference between the name brand cake mixes.

Yellow cake mix
 

I just opened up the flyertalk app on my phone and when I saw this post I almost spit out my beer... The wide variety of posts here never fail to amuse me

yellow cake mix. mmmm. now I know what I'm having for dinner.

Just to be clear .... you don't eat it with a spoon, you have to make it first. :p

You can have the cake mix. I'll take the cake frosting. :D

I would rather have the sugar from the cake frosting than cake.

Of course! The batter is where it's all at.

Now I know what I'm having as an amuse bouche!

Raw cake batter? That I would enjoy.
When we have birthday cake, I usually insist on a corner, with lots of frosting, and then try to eat the frosting and give the cake away. :D

Is this your birthday cake or are you steeling the best bits of someone else's?

I am equally considerate. I always tell my wife that the crunchy part of the baguette would not do her teeth any good. I'm thoughtful like that.

Both. :D Any excuse for cake! :D

Yellow cake mix
 

My family members swear by Betty Crocker cake mix as they tend to produce a much moister cake than other mixes. It also helps if one uses an airbake-type pan.

I have tried the Cake Boss brand cake mixes and they are good. IIRC, Buddy's specialties are yellow and red velvet cakes, so those should be good. However, those mixes are around $4-5, versus $1-2 for Betty Crocker mixes.

Did someone say "yellowcake?"

https://whythatsdelightful.files.wor...ick-cheney.jpg

Between the name brand and what - the generic/store brand?

I think there's a rather noticeable difference there.

No, the 3 name brands of cake mixes that are all $1-$2/box. Pillsbury, Betty Crocker, Duncan Hines.

I'm confused - those were the ones I was referring to. You were saying there was no difference between those name brands (Pillsbury, Betty Crocker, etc) and.. what?

No difference between any of the name brands, i.e, no difference between Betty Crocker and Pillsbury, or Pillsbury and Duncan Hines.

In college I had a friend who loved frosting, which I hate. I'd give her mine, and she'd give me her naked cake after she'd sliced off the frosting. Made us both happy. :):)

Is "she gave me her naked cake" what you called it at your college? :o ;)

Betty Crocker Super Moist butter recipe yellow. I make 1 or 2 yellow cakes a week and this is always my favorite.

My mother is diabetic, so when I was growing up, she'd have a small piece of cake, but wouldn't eat the frosting. She'd scrape that off, and I'd happily take that too.

"Would you like to have some radiation with that?" :D

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellowcake

Her boyfriend wouldn't have liked that. :p

I was referring strictly to the things that came in pink boxes from the Portuguese bakery in Fox Point that was on my cycling route. Angelfood with chocolate frosting for preference.

however you make it, i enjoy adding icing made from a combination of limoncello liqueur and powdered sugar

You know, it's really not all that difficult to make the cake from fresh ingredients. Reading the ingredients on the box sounds more like a science experiment than a dessert.

I can't understand why someone would buy a box full of chemicals to make cake. It's so easy to make properly, and tastes like real cake if done properly.

I don't really make cakes much, but it would be really great if one of the enthusiastic and knowledgeable cake makers started a thread and showcased some of the cakes they're most proud of and their secrets.

I don't always have all of the ingredients in the house (I don't always keep flour and sugar in the house, because I don't often use them), but usually have a box or two of cake mix.

I can't claim to be an "enthusiastic and knowledgeable cake maker" but I do make my own cakes (and bread when I have the time).

Here's a birthday cake I took in the office for my birthday last year. Unfortunately I didn't think of taking a 'crumb' shot after we had cut it but it was a double chocolate fudge cake with vanilla buttercream filling.

http://i1161.photobucket.com/albums/...pswui98gw7.jpg

I've been asked to make a similar a few times for people so it couldn't have been too bad.

I can bake but I can't decorate so the chocolate fingers/smarties combo on the sides and top are a great solution and look quite impressive.

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!