I bet you couldn't consistently make a cake even half as good as a box mix for even triple it's cost.

People who don't bake often then baking is just throwing some stuff together and heating it up. It's very hard to get consistent results! It's literally an exact science. Did you weigh all the ingredients exactly? Did your mix and sift them evenly? Is your leavening agent fresh? Did you account for the humidity in your area and kitchen? Does your oven actually heat at the temperature it says? Does it heat evenly inside? Maybe you can pull off a good cake once or twice, but can you do it again, in a different kitchen? What about a smaller cake or bigger one? Box mixes take as many variables out of the equation as possible. They are very forgiving and delicious. There is no shame in using one for the home.

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SamBam 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Totally false, in large part because a real cake recipe is not usually just a collection of dry ingredients and an egg, the way Betty Crocker usually is.

Box mixes use powdered milks. Powdered vanilla flavor. They use the cheapest powdered chocolate. Sometimes they don't even both making you throw in an egg because they use powdered egg.

I don't care how precisely that's measured, it's not going to be as good as my recipe with fresh eggs, fresh milk, real vanilla, and good quality bars of baking chocolate.

And that's even setting aside techniques. My favorite chocolate cake involves pouring boiling water into the ingredients, because of the way it melts the chocolate. Show me a Betty Crocker mix that does that.

Obviously if the only recipe you've seen from scratch is just a replica of the things in the box (and you use similarly low-quality ingredients) then sure, having the precise measurements is nice, I guess.

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nrclark a day ago | parent [-]

Agreed for flavor - using good ingredients makes a huge difference. But texture is also a big part of how we experience food, and box cake's texture is very hard to beat IMO (at least I've never been able to do it).

	▲	Talanes 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I'm currently reading 'Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat' and the author talks about this exact dilemma. She attributed the difference to the fact that box-cake recipes tend to use oil for the fat, while recipes from scratch often prefer butter. The way oil can fully coat the flour changes how the gluten chains develop during baking, which changes the texture.

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dml2135 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Baking may not be easy but it’s not that hard.

If you bake from scratch, then maybe your results won’t be as good at first, but like anything else you will get better with experience and improve with time.

Like, would you suggest people only eat frozen TV dinners because the results will be more consistent than if they cooked a meal themselves?

	▲	lifeformed 2 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I'm saying its not trivial to replace a box mix in a recipe with from scratch ingredients. And no, frozen dinners don't have very good flavor or texture compared to the food it emulates. Boxed cakes are superior than from-scratch cakes by many metrics. But yes, I agree that people should definitely make their own and try to get better. It's just not a trivial replacement in a recipe. Box mixes in certain granny subcultures are a staple ingredient, almost on the tier of flour. If my meatloaf glaze recipe calls for ketchup, I'll just use Heinz or whatever, and not make it from scratch, unless it was really important to me.
	▲	lazyasciiart 2 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		If they’re only going to need dinner once a month? Hell yes.

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com2kid 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Consistency is hard, but quality isn't.

If I use my eggs from neighbor's chickens, fancy chocolate, and organic milk from a local dairy, the cake is going to taste better (90% from the better chocolate honestly).

Quality improvements are easy.

Consistency is harder, but anyone with a kitchen scale and half an eye for detail should be able to pull it off. It takes me 3 or 4 goes at a recipe before I get super consistent with it, but it isn't rocket science (which also demands consistency!)

> What about a smaller cake or bigger one?

Boxes don't help here since their cooking instructions are for a fixed dimension, changing the cake size significantly for even boxed cakes requires understanding what you are doing. Again, not hard, but it isn't a win for box cakes.

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ProfessorLayton a day ago | parent [-]

Okay, but it's also possible to use high quality eggs and fancy chocolate in a box mix, so it's not necessarily a strict upgrade to go from scratch either?

Especially since there's differing levels of quality for boxed cakes too! My local chocolate maker in the SFBAY makes fancy chocolate and cake/brownie mixes, and honestly they're great. The brownie mix specifically comes out better than what I can get in a typical bakery in here in SF.

	▲	com2kid 19 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> Okay, but it's also possible to use high quality eggs and fancy chocolate in a box mix, so it's not necessarily a strict upgrade to go from scratch either? Except the conversation is about Betty Crocker mixes, which are the very definition of built to cost. Also for whatever reason when I've used the bougie organic box mixes, the results have been very middling. e.g. not baking, but I can make better pancakes from scratch than what comes out of a bag of Birch Benders. Related, the bougie brands with higher quality ingredients tend to not use as fancy of chemistry in their mixes, so you get better ingredients but you don't get the advanced chemistry.