I prefer homemade scratch cakes. The work or luck is in finding a yummy recipe.

Sheilajoyce, y'know how there are all those recipes for remaking a box mix? You can do the same thing with scratch cakes. I have a few really good recipes, and will just retune them to play in other keys. Though I can also go full on improv dumped into a bowl. :)

Martha, thanks for posting. I don't remember oil in cake mix, and we definitely used milk, so I guess I'm old enough to be an "original". :) My mother used to give mixes to us to play at cake baking when we were too little to get the flour down and measured without supervision. Then my father would come "caulk" them for us (frosting the sides). The return to "real" cake mix is fascinating! Not that long ago, I read that you have to add the milk and eggs because they wanted the housewives to feel like they were actually baking, which just stirring water into powder wouldn't do.

I just checked on Amazon and couldn’t believe the price! Is this seriously for just one cake mix??

https://www.amazon.com/Betty-Crocker-Baking-Original-Recipe/dp/B06XW61Q8M/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_1_a_it?ie=UTF8&qid=1509531076&sr=8-1-fkmr0&keywords=betty%2Bs%2Boriginal%2Brecipe%2Bscratch%2Bcake%2Bmix%2B-%2Bgolden%2Byellow&th=1

Growing up in my house, Mom wasn't a baker. The only cakes I remember were usually either a cake mix or a simple cake made from a jiffy mix type of product and seldom. So when I took up housekeeping I thought that was the only way for a long time. And I didn't know anyone who made cakes from scratch. The trend was the pudding-in-the-mix box and we all thought that was the bomb. Then I gradually discovered making cakes from scratch and haven't gone back. I truly like the textures of home-made. I admit I haven't gone completely to the far side such as angel food and chiffon, etc. But I'm not crazy about eating air anyways. I'm also completely inept at fancy decorations. But I do admire people who can do it. I worked with a woman who took up cake decorating as a hobby and she would come in with the most fantastically decorated cakes, almost too good to cut. But then she would use a cake mix to make the cakes. I told her that putting that wonderful art on a cake mix was like dressing a pig in a prom dress. She said "I don't do cakes from scratch". What a waste of talent!

Worth a try

I have several doctored up recipes, and yes, I am not that much of a baker to want to make from scratch, Good for all of you who do, but for the one cake I might make per year, a mix is just fine. And all the doctored recipes use the full-sized mixes. So this is good news.

colleenoz: that price is for 8 boxes of mix, so $3.46 each.

Yes, but when the 'regular' smaller mixes go on sale, they can cost under $1.50; sometimes well under $1.50.

Oh, thanks for pointing out that it’s for 8 mixes. I didn’t notice that. Still too expensive for me though.

$2.48 cost in Wal-Mart stores.

You have to expect the mixes to cost more from Amazon because the cost of shipping is built into the price...so much for 'Prime'.

I dislike cake mixes, but my daughter loves them. I think they are too "fluffy" and they are more expensive than making my own from scratch and they all have a strange artificial flavor. My yellow cake recipe is from King Arthur flour and only has 8 ingredients, so I'll save my money, spend 30 more seconds and use 8 ingredients instead of 4, adding only flour, sugar, leavening and vanilla to the ingredients required by the cake mix directions.

I do like to decorate cakes and use fondant as frosting/decoration many times. I find that cake mix cakes are not sturdy enough for my purposes unless they are "doctored" with things like sour cream and extra eggs, in which case I'm back to my 8 ingredient stand-by.

I don't find that I save money or time by using mixes, so I'll stick with my "from scratch" version. In addition, if I want to make a pumpkin roll, a chiffon cake, a hot milk type, I still have to bake from scratch as cake mixes are very basic and I almost never make a "plain old" cake.

Annie

I only brought up this product not to have a discussion of scratch versus mix cakes but rather because there was a thread this summer about how cake mixes have shrunk. And people were complaining about it. GM must have heard for they've brought out this new cake mix that it a bigger size.

I figured that was why :-)

But, I have to say, if you only pay $1.50 for a cake mix no wonder they generally taste like carp...

I like the texture of box mixes, but hate the flavor, but have a couple of recipes where you have add ins that I really like. I will look for this the next time I'm out. DH makes an apricot nectar cake that calls for cake mix that often falls on him while he never had a problem before. I have wondered if it wasn't the shrinking size of the mix. I know one company claims it makes the same size cake as previously, but not in my kitchen. I usually make scratch cakes, although I'm having a hard time finding a scratch yellow cake that isn't dry & sort of cornbread like. I usually make cakes that are extra moist like carrot or Italian cream, but sometimes I just want an old fashioned yellow cake with chocolate icing.