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.