Runner-up
This mix requires the most work and added ingredients of any we tested, but it delivers tall, impressive cake layers that you can pass off as homemade.
If you come to boxed cake mix for an easy, quick, cheap way to make a cake, King Arthur Golden Yellow Cake Mix is not the mix for you—it requires about as much work as baking from scratch. But if you want a cake that tastes as good as homemade and you don’t bake enough to want to buy all the dry ingredients you need in bulk, this boxed cake mix is a boon.
It calls for a stick of butter, ⅓ cup of vegetable oil, four eggs, and a cup of milk, whereas most of the other mixes we tested called for just three eggs, water, and oil. The mix also calls for a bit of baking prowess, requiring reverse creaming, a technique where you first combine the flour and butter.
The box doesn’t say you have to do this with an electric mixer, but beating softened butter into flour with just a spoon is no small task, and we found a mixer all but mandatory. The instructions also require some tedious fractioning of ingredients, like separating the bag into two thirds and one third and alternating between adding milk and the remaining dry ingredients to finish up the batter.
This mix left us reading and rereading the instructions the way we are used to when working with a recipe, a far cry from the pleasantly mindless dump-and-stir method of the other mixes we tested. We dirtied more dishes and spent more time mixing with this box than any other we tested.
But all this work shows up in the finished product. This mix created beautiful, delectable cake layers. King Arthur’s mix has the largest volume of any mix we tested, at 24 ounces. As such, it bakes up tall, impressive layers that you could even cut in half horizontally to make a four-layer cake.
Inside those attractive cake layers is an even, delicate crumb—none of the random bubbles or unsettling sponginess of other boxed mixes we tested. The cake is free from off-puttingly sweet flavors, artificial oddity, or cake-battery rawness. Tasters highlighted the buttery richness of this cake, its real vanilla aroma, the hint of almond extract flavor, and an elegant touch of salt. The flavor profile even elevated the canned frosting we tasted the cake with, but if you’re going to shell out for this mix, it’d be better served by homemade buttercream.
Like all the cakes we tested that are made with butter, this cake is just slightly dryer than the oil-only boxed mixes, and it dries out faster. Still, this cake impressed us, and we think it will impress a crowd. You should totally tell them you made it from scratch, since you basically did!
Allergens: King Arthur Golden Yellow Cake Mix does not contain any common allergens besides wheat.
