In our Taste Test series, BA editors conduct blind comparisons to discover the best supermarket staples (like vanilla ice cream or frozen pizza). Today, which boxed yellow cake mix is party ready?
Boxed cake mixes were patented in 1933 by a Pittsburgh molasses company called P. Duff and Sons as a way to use the company’s excess molasses. Sales increased over the years, but the boxed cake genre really began booming in the 1950s, when companies began including sugary frosting in their marketing.
So many of us have fond memories of baking boxed cake mixes at home. We made an absolute mess of our kitchens baking a boxed cake mix during sleepovers with our friends, messily cracking eggs and spilling oil everywhere. We waited impatiently for the oven to preheat while frantically baking a few cupcakes for a school bake sale. Everyone has their favorite flavor of cake mix (mine's devil's food cake), but if we were going to bet on one to please an entire crowd, the choice is easy: classic yellow.
Of course, a yellow cake mix can always be spruced up, but finding the best mix is still a critical first step. We tested eight boxed yellow cake mixes, baking them according to the instructions on their boxes, to determine which was the most delicious. We tasted them plain, and with a swoop of chocolate frosting, and judged on color, flavor, texture, and effort. There were disagreements, there was compromise, there was, in short, drama. Here’s what we thought.
Too Much Work: King Arthur Baking Golden Yellow Cake Mix
What’s inside: King Arthur’s boxed yellow cake mix contains the fewest ingredients of all our competitors—essentially just flour, sugar, and baking powder. While simple is usually better, in this case it meant that we had to add a lot of ingredients ourselves. In the end, it was almost as much work as making a cake from scratch.
The verdict: Many of our editors swear by King Arthur’s products, but their boxed yellow cake mix was a flop. A boxed mix is ostensibly supposed to make cake making easier. But King Arthur’s required us to reverse cream our own softened butter and oil, plus add milk and four eggs—more than any of the other mixes we tested. What’s more, the resulting cake didn’t bake all the way through at the prescribed time and temperature—we’re talking a pudding consistency in the center. And the parts that did bake were dry and bland.
The Lemony Outlier: Jiffy Golden Yellow Cake Mix
What’s inside: The small blue box of Jiffy cake mix features a relatively long ingredients list which, notably, includes flaxseed. It’s an uncommon ingredient in the mixes we tested, but it also appears in Jiffy’s brownie mix, which scored low in its taste test. It’s worth noting too that Jiffy was the only mix requiring an 8x8" pan for baking—not quite the celebration-ready sheet cake you’re looking for from a boxed cake mix.
The verdict: We should have predicted from the ragged edges that rose out of this cake with each cut that there would be issues. It was unevenly baked, as associate cooking and SEO editor Zoe Denenberg noticed, and the problems only got worse from there. Instead of the light vanilla we expected, Jiffy’s boxed yellow cake mix tasted like thin, metallic, artificial lemon. Senior food editor Kelsey Youngman called it “a cake you would buy at a train station,” which is a creative and vivid way to say what we were all thinking: If someone brought this cake to a birthday party, we would ask that person to leave said birthday party.
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The Ugly Duckling: Duncan Hines Classic Yellow Cake Mix
What’s inside: This mix doesn’t use regular palm oil, it uses fractionated palm oil. Fractionated sounds like rocket science, but really it’s just fancy industry-speak that means separating the types of fat in the oil. This makes palm oil solid at room temperature, which makes it a useful, shelf-stable ingredient that keeps cakes moist and encourages a fluffy crumb.
The verdict: Duncan Hines was the only cake that cracked on the top—a sign, Zoe said, that there was too much leavening in the mix. The appearance was a big deal for her. “It looks shriveled up and condensed,” she said, observing the way the edges of the cake had rippled as they pulled away from the cake pan with a pained expression. Unfortunately, its flavor wasn’t much better. Associate director of social media Urmila Ramakrishnan thought her bite tasted particularly floury, and declared Duncan Hines the driest of the bunch. There wasn’t much to love.
The Drearily Dull: 365 Whole Foods Market Classic Yellow Cake Mix
What’s inside: 365 uses unbleached flour in its cake mix, which can make a big difference in the final texture and flavor of a cake. As food editor Shilpa Uskokovic explains, unbleached flour can make a cake “coarse, faintly crumbly like cornbread, and noticeably sweeter because of the lack of acid,” than cakes made with bleached flour (like the mixes from Jiffy, Betty Crocker, Pillsbury, Great Value, and Duncan Hines).
The verdict: Aside from being domed in the center, which makes for a less beautiful frosted cake, this cake mix’s cardinal sin was that it just wasn’t very sweet. Senior cooking editor Emma Laperruque said it “tastes like nothing,” and Urmila called it “bread, not cake.” We missed any kind of vanilla or caramel notes that our favorites had in spades. The group also noticed that the texture here wasn’t right. Instead of springy or airy, it was dense and a little stretchy, like a dinner roll. Still it baked and browned evenly, and the mix came together in a snap. It wasn’t what we’re looking for, but it wasn’t not actively bad either. Some fancy frosting could probably rescue this bland cake if you found yourself in a dessert emergency.
Beautifully Average: Betty Crocker Super Moist Cake Mix Butter Recipe Yellow
What’s inside: While every other mix uses sugar for sweetening, Betty Crocker’s mix uses both sugar and corn syrup. Corn syrup is used in baking as an invert sugar—that is, a sugar that stays in liquid form at room temperature. It’s an ingredient that’s used to add sweetness, but also to retain moisture.
The verdict: Betty Crocker’s yellow cake mix produced a cake that felt familiar, but pretty average—lightly sweet, without any striking flavors. There were wisps of sunny vanilla notes in each bite, and we found the crumb to be especially springy. In the end, this one ranked in the middle of the pack because of its cottony texture, becoming gummy before dissolving in our mouths. We prefer a cake with more distinct flavors and a more insistent chew. Still, we recognize that a cake that’s delicate isn’t the worst thing in the world.
The Great Fallback: Pillsbury Moist Supreme Yellow Premium Cake Mix
What’s inside: All of the usual suspects make an appearance on this ingredients list, which looks suspiciously similar to Great Value’s. One thing to note is that the sugar content in Pillsbury’s is higher than Great Value’s—but more on that below.
The verdict: Our editors thought Pillsbury’s yellow cake mix would be a great option in a pinch. Zoe enjoyed that its sweetness tasted less artificial than some other cakes in our taste test. The vanilla was bright and in your face, but lacked some of the deeper caramel notes our favorites had. Emma thought it was a bit crumblier than other options—not ideal, but not a dealbreaker either.
The Deliciously Unusual: Trader Joe’s Yellow Cake and Baking Mix
What’s inside: Like its competitors, Trader Joe’s boxed cake mix requires the baker to add eggs, but it also lists egg yolks among its ingredients. Egg yolks add richness to a cake because they allow the batter to hold more moisture, and, as Harold McGee writes in On Food and Cooking, adding extra egg yolks “improves their aerating ability” in the batter. Also worth noting that Trader Joe’s mix doesn’t include the food dyes present in other mixes, so extra egg yolks also contribute to the buttercup yellow color of the cake.
The verdict: Our tasters were vexed by Trader Joe’s yellow cake. We loved how it tasted—caramel, vanilla, and brown butter were a few of the notes we enjoyed—but it didn’t quite taste like yellow cake. It was closer to pound cake or even a sugar cookie in flavor. Zoe called it a cake that wouldn’t need frosting, just a cup of tea and a good book. Although it was denser than some other cakes in our test, it retained enough springiness in each bite to feel light. And while it was the best-tasting cake we tried, we couldn’t call it our winner. It looked like a yellow cake, it smelled like a yellow cake, but it tasted like something wholly different. Though we enjoyed slice after slice, it didn’t give us that classic, nostalgic boxed cake mix experience we wanted. For that, you’ll have to go to Walmart.
The Absolute Greatest: Great Value Deluxe Yellow Cake Mix
What’s inside: Great Value’s ingredients list is very similar to Pillsbury’s, which is to say there’s nothing out of the ordinary. All the familiar players make an appearance, but perhaps that’s why Great Value’s cake mix produced a cake that tasted exactly as we remember yellow cake mixes tasting at park birthday parties in kindergarten.
The verdict: Great Value’s boxed cake mix was our Platonic ideal of a yellow cake. It had a deep vanilla flavor, and Kelsey described its enticingly sweet aroma as “hitting that nostalgia spot.” Associate cooking editor Antara Sinha loved that it was “sweet, but it doesn’t go overboard.” And the consensus was that the cake struck the blissful balance of light and springy, but could still hold up to a frosting. This was no angel’s food cake, but it didn’t stray into pound cake territory either. We couldn’t stop taking bite after bite.