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This is just a yellow cake made from a box mix with homemade chocolate icing, but everybody loves it!
Whenever my grandma would make cake, typically for someone’s birthday, she would make whatever their favorite cake was. But, she would also make what we like to call an “Everybody Cake.” It’s just a yellow cake with chocolate icing, but everybody likes that kind. It was really just her way of making sure everybody had a dessert to eat that they liked. The majority of baked goods my grandma made were done from scratch, but this cake she would make using a box mix, specifically Duncan Hines. That’s very important. The icing, though, would be her recipe (which is actually just from the back of the Hershey’s cocoa, but you didn’t hear that from me). I don’t have any one specific memory with this cake, but it reminds me of times that we would go over to my grandparents’ house for cake and ice cream on our birthdays. We lived across the street from them, so of course we were going to include them in our celebration, along with anyone else who happened to stop by to enjoy some cake. I remember gathering around her kitchen table, singing happy birthday, and enjoying time together. It was simple, but it was the best way to celebrate.
It’s been a long time since I had everybody cake, so it was a delightfully nostalgic treat to have this week. While making it, though, I used the opportunity to try out a “hack” I’ve seen online for making a box mix taste more like a bakery cake. I’ll tell you what I did and you can try it out for yourself.
Before moving on, I know my image below shows a Betty Crocker mix when I said my grandma used Duncan Hines. They didn’t have the Duncan Hines yellow cake mix at the store I went to, so I just got the Betty Crocker.
Box Mix to Bakery Cake
If you’ve seen it online like I have, you’ve see that people claim you can make a box mix taste like it came from a bakery by substituting a few different ingredients, rather than just following what is written on the box. To bake the cake this way you read the instructions and do the following:
- Add 1 or 2 extra eggs – the number you add is based on preference.
- The box mix I used called for 3 eggs. I just did one extra because 5 eggs for one 9×13 cake seemed excessive.
- Replace oil with melted butter and double the amount
- The instructions said to add a 1/4 cup of vegetable oil, so I did a stick of butter, which is 1/2 cup.
- Replace water with milk
- I added 1 cup of milk instead of the 1 cup of water that was in the instructions.
- Bake according to the instructions on the box
- I have seen posts where people use this hack to make a round layer cake, but my grandma always made everybody cake as a 9×13. It just seemed wrong to do it any other way. According to the box, a 9×13 cake should be baked for 24-29 minutes at 350°. Mine baked for 25 minutes.
My Review
Maybe it’s because it’s been a while since I’ve had a box mix cake, but I don’t feel like baking it this way made that much of a difference. The texture may have been a little bit better, but I don’t think it makes the cake so much better that it’s worth using the hack every time. I also felt the cake itself was lacking a little bit in flavor, but my grandma would probably tell me that’s because I used the Betty Crocker mix. Now I feel like I need to buy the Duncan Hines and retry it…
Either way, the real game changer if you’re going to make a box mix cake and want it to taste better is the icing. Box cake mix isn’t terrible, but to me, store bought icing tastes artificial, which then makes the cake as a whole taste meh. So, if you are going to make a box mix at least make your icing. You’ll have a decent cake, and the icing will elevate it rather than bring it down. For this everybody cake, I used my grandma’s chocolate icing, which I have posted before with the chocolate chocolate cupcakes recipe. Also, because I was leaving the cake in the 9×13 pan and only putting icing on top, I halved the recipe.
Overall, I probably wouldn’t use this hack again, but I would encourage others to try it for themselves at least once. For me, it seemed like just using extra ingredients that were not necessary to get a similar result. For someone else, they might find they like it better than the box instructions. In the end, it was a fun little experiment to try, and I still got a pretty yummy cake out of it. If you try it out, let me know what you think!
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