Box Cake Mix Hack
When it comes to baking, I am always game for an excellent time-saving hack! I wanted to bake a lemon cake; sadly, the store was completely sold out of the mix. Rather than toss my plans aside, I decided to hack my way to my own at-home lemon box cake. When scouring Pinterest for a recipe, I came across a post to enhance a store-bought box cake mix to be better than the bakery. Intrigued, I decided to follow the recipe and see if it were just as good if not better than buying a bakery made cake!
I have to tell you…it absolutely was! I’m no food blogger, but I felt the need to share this recipe with all my fellow time-saving craving mamas. This is the perfect semi-homemade dessert for birthdays or holidays and will get you serious kudos at your next gathering. Keep reading to read the better than the bakery, box cake hack!
BETTER THAN THE BAKERY Box-cake mix hack recipe
follow box directions, but replace the following:
- replace whole milk for water
- replace melted butter for oil and double the quantity
- add one extra egg!
So, if you’re anything like me, you may be asking, what makes it better? For one, it’s not your typical tasteless box cake fluff. The cake consistency post-baking is much denser. The addition of another egg and the trade-offs for the ingredients above make it overall much more flavorful. I purchased a standard white cake mix from Pillsbury for this recipe. The baking time we followed was for two nine-inch round pans.
I further adapted this recipe to turn it into a lemon cake. To do this, I added the following:
zest from 3 Lemons
1/2 C Fresh Lemon Juice
I folded in the above ingredients in after following the box instructions. I didn’t adjust the bake time and found them to be perfect at around 32 minutes. This time could vary between ovens!
You may have also noticed that my cake is noticeably smaller than a 9” round. I ended up using one of Evie’s little kid’s bowls to trace circles in the cooled cakes to make them around 4 1/2 rounds. Each 9” baked cake produced two smaller cake rounds. From here, I stacked four rounds, which icing between to create a petite cake. The key I found to making the layers stack is to stay patient and only frost your cakes after they have thoroughly cooled! Keep your icing relatively firm and refrigerate between steps. You could opt to use skewers for support if you’re worried about it toppling over in the fridge.
