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.