The Great Cake Debate Continues…

I decided there was no more beating around the bush and took the box mix on head to head. I went back to an old standby for my cake recipe and then went out and (gasp!) bought a cake mix and a tub of frosting. I felt kind of dirty doing that.

So, I ended up making two yellow cakes with chocolate icing. One completely from scratch and one from a box. A few notes about that:

• The yellow cake box mix is a weird shade of yellow. The only way I can think of matching that color is to add yellow food coloring to my batter.
• Everyone loves box cake because it’s so moist and light. I have to admit, it’s ridiculously fluffy (which is what Andrew exclaimed as he was stuffing his face with cake scraps), and figuring out how to make a cake like that from scratch may become my new life’s mission.
• Canned icing smells even more artificial than box mix cake.
• Canned icing also has a very sticky texture. It’s like spreading thickened mod podge on a cake.
• The best part about making the box mix was spraying the pan with cooking spray instead of buttering and flouring it.
• Box cake is very crumbly. That’s why no one uses it for making shaped cakes.
• Box cake has 4 ingredients. From scratch cake has 7.
• The baked cake mix was so yellow it looked kind of like cornbread (it’s the one of the right in the photo above).

However, this didn’t end up being a fair fight. I did a terrible job of planning my week and ended up baking the from scratch cake three days before the box mix. By the time it came to do the taste test, my from scratch cake was three days old and starting to dry out. I tried to take an unofficial poll at work, but my plans were foiled when one of my coworkers just up and took an entire cake to a different floor. So much for comparison tasting.

I won over a box mix lover with the flavor of the from scratch cake, but she claimed that it was a brand issue. Others were swayed by the moistness of the box cake. So the cake-off continues. Next time is Betty Crocker and I’m baking all of the cakes on the same day. Let’s try this again…