Cake is one of my favorite desserts, but making a pastry masterpiece is time-consuming and creates a mess of stray flour and frosting. So I decided to skip the “from scratch” part and elevate boxed cake mixes with some recipe kits I found online.
I had high hopes for this cake because of all the added ingredients it contained: four eggs, one and one fourth cup of milk, one box of yellow cake and a pound of butter. But my high expectations for a soft, buttery dessert were not met from a website that claims it will taste like a $6 dollar piece of cake.
The cake was dense, and — though it looked great on the outside, moist and fluffy — the flavor was underwhelming.
I know you can’t doctor up a plain vanilla cake easily, but there needed to be a lot more flavor to get me to pay 6 dollars a piece.
I didn’t even think this would work because the recipe contains only two ingredients — cake mix and soda.
The process was simple: add one boxed cake with any can of soda and put it in the oven — that’s it. I used the recommended combination of chocolate cake and cherry Coke.
After smelling the chocolatey scent that wafted out of the oven, I wanted to like this cake, But the first and only bite had me immediately washing it down with water — it was so gross. It crumbled as I tried to cut it — I couldn’t taste the Coke until a strange and out-of-place aftertaste of fizz of the cherry Coke hit me. Despite this recipe claims, soda definitely doesn’t belong in a cake mix.
This chocolate cake was the best out of the three — super simple to make and tasted homemade. It called for one box of cake mix, milk, eggs, butter, vanilla extract and pudding.
Though it might seem weird adding vanilla extract and vanilla pudding to a chocolate cake, I think that’s what made it so good. The cake was thicker, and I liked the taste of the pudding in it. I’d believe that it was fresh from a professional bakery.
These cakes were easy and not time consuming compared to homemade ones.I like the idea of having a shortcut to make homemade cakes from scratch, but they can be a real hit or miss. Watch out for reviews of a recipe before you try it.