Cake from grocery store bakeries all taste terrible to me. If i’m offered cake and it looks like it’s from a grocery store, i pass. I really like cake though. I’m not a snob either; i love Betty Crocker cake.
I understand that some stores don’t actually make their “bakery” stuff in house anymore, but even the real deal is gross.
Maybe some upscale groceries have good cake, but i don’t have any of those places near me. Two of the three regional chains in my area have ok bread. Maybe one has decent cookies.
Does anyone else share this sentiment? Does anyone know why store bought cake is so gross? I’m not much of a baker, so i don’t know what goes into making a good cake, but i think there must be some major corners being cut here. If you sell a cake, it should at the very least be as good as boxed cake mix cake.
To me, the problem with industrial cake is the frosting. It’s disgusting. Oily, claggy, grainy, too sweet… If you’re making a quick cake at home, by all means use the box mix for the cake, but make the frosting yourself. Or make a cake that doesn’t need frosting, like lemon drizzle!
I could eat an entire cake that was made of only that frosting. I love it. I was the kid who always wanted one of the flowers (or whatever frosting decorations were on it). I’m now the adult that will quietly grab some of the piping around the edges when no one’s looking.
In a previous thread, someone said that supermarket cakes start out as sheet cakes that are baked in a factory bakery someplace, frozen and delivered to the stores. There, they are cut to size, layered as necessary and iced or frosted. So presumably the cakes lose some flavor in being frozen and defrosted. Since I read that, I’ve checked the supermarkets I visit. Usually I can see large commercial ovens, but I can’t say for sure that I’ve seen actual cakes being baked. And when one of my brother’s kids had a birthday party and I volunteered to supply the cake, I compared the price on supermarket cakes with one from a small local bakery. The bakery cake was a lot more expensive, and since it was basically a children’s party, no one noticed the difference in quality.
My sister used to work in a grocery store bakery. People loved the cinnamon rolls and we asked for the recipe. She said she had no idea—everything arrived frozen and they defrosted it or baked it, labeled it, and put it out. That wasn’t like, say, Entenmann’s, which arrived already boxed and may have been baked three days ago, so preservatives are needed etc.
My mom used to decorate cakes and she always made the nastiest frosting. Reason: the inclusion of Crisco made it easier for her to create flowers etc. According to this, you can use Crisco for a year after you open it. Ugh. Shelf stability.
They have ovens since they do still make some things from scratch and bake them their. They likely also get a lot of frozen, par-baked things that they have to finish cooking.
But a lot of desserts come in frozen and how they look in the case is pretty much exactly how they looked a few hours ago in their freezer.
A friend of mine got a job at a local, largeish grocery store that’s known for being ‘high end’ (at least as compared to kroger type stores). She walked out during the orientation. In her words “I didn’t go to Le Cordon Bleu so I could babysit things while they thaw out”.
It was a good thing too. She’s since worked at a few bakeries, but the head pastry chef with a large restaurant group and at some point in the mix took first place on a Food Network baking show.
Also, my store doesn’t have birthday cake type cakes, but we do have good amount of bakery, including some really, really good cake and some pies and it comes in frozen. In fact, people that have been buying forever, if they grab some and it’s still cold (so, obviously frozen), they won’t want it. They’ll be concerned about the quality, not realizing they’ve been buying it for years and never knew.
My sister-in-law (brother’s wife) has a cousin who trained as a pastry chef and ended up working in the bakery at Whole Foods for a while. Later, she had an office job at some medical clinic. And one office in which I worked had an HR staffer who also trained as a pastry chef. In short, it seems like one of those things where the schools turn out far more trained graduates than there are available jobs.
I worked at a faux-fancy mall bakery in 1994 as a baker. Most of my work consisted of thawing out bread dough and baking it, or putting frozen danishes in the oven and baking them. I was supposed to spend the remainder of my time either baking or managing the bakery counter.
That flexibility was key: I spent as much time as I could making up new recipes or finding (not online, it was 1994) cool recipes to try. Some were duds, others were hits.
After a couple of months, the store owner hired a kitchen manager with a distinct pedigree, having trained at a fancy Swiss culinary school. Every day at that job was a humiliation for her, and the bitterness positively oozed from her pores.
Since then, I’ve looked at most bakeries with a jaundiced eye.
This is correct - supermarket bakeries don’t use butter in cakes, it’s way too expensive. Often they use butter-flavored shortening (Sweetex and other brands), but it’s nowhere near as good as butter. To make up for the blandness of the shortening, more artificial flavors are added (vanillin and a touch of artificial lemon flavoring are most common in white cakes).
The awful frosting is what makes them truly terrible. Again, no butter, just shortening and other glop. And lots of artificial vanilla.
So that’s the problem, I would guess. Not that they are baked elsewhere and frozen. Baked goods generally freeze very well, and I have enjoyed many home-made cakes and cookies that had been frozen for a while.
And it’s not just the frosting, which tastes like sugar and crisco and food coloring (yes, often there’s so much food coloring I can taste it) but the cake itself. I can eat around the frosting. On a bad day I even enjoy sweetened crisco. The the cake itself tastes terrible. Fake, nasty, just wrong.
I mean, if I go to the local bakery and don’t specifically request buttercream, then I get the same crappy frosting as Kroger, Meijer, or Costco… and keep in mind, Costco cakes are highly revered for some strange reason. I bought one today, due to reverence of other people.
Cake it cake. It’s always overwhelmed by the frosting. It’s critical to have a frosting that doesn’t destroy the overall cake.
I mean, if I go to the local bakery and don’t specifically request buttercream, then I get the same crappy frosting as Kroger, Meijer, or Costco… and keep in mind, Costco cakes are highly revered for some strange reason. I bought one today, due to reverence of other people.
Cake it cake. It’s always overwhelmed by the frosting. It’s critical to have a frosting that doesn’t destroy the overall cake.
Giant Eagle in PA/OH makes great cakes! People always comment at parties how nice they are. However their cakes still might be shit to someone with more refined taste than me.
One caveat to that - some of their cakes have whipped cream frosting. They don’t always mark which is whipped cream and which is not. I HATE whipped cream frosting, to the point that I have thrown a cake away, given a cake away, and given a single slice I’ve bought to my dogs.
Once again, they might also have good whipped cream frosted cakes (they definitely LOOK good, which is why they continue to fool me) but to my taste buds they’re gross as heck.
Costco cakes aren’t that bad, and I have had ones from Giant PA.
But then the last time I was in the U.S. I was chowing down on white cake and telling my mother it was good. She told me 1) it was from a mix (but made by a friend of hers) and 2) it had been previously frozen.
So the moral of the story? Whatever it is, it’s better than the foamboard they try to pass off as cake here.
And if you really want good cake and don’t think you have the skills to bake from scratch? Mixes aren’t that bad. And there are plenty of easy hacks to improve a cake made from a mix.
And frosting? If it doesn’t have cream cheese, I’m not interested. Lemon drizzle is so much easier.
I had to give up cake when it turned out I couldn’t eat gluten anymore. Been more than 5 years since I’ve had any, but I recall that the Wal-Mart cakes tasted. . .no wait, they didn’t taste. The icing was OK-ish, but the cake part was not worth eating. When I was young, we’d go to a local bakery, and while they were pricier, they were doable for a lower-class family on birthdays and special occasions. Now I look at $25 cakes at Wal-mart, and wondering what bakeries would charge, if you could even find one.
If I were to eat cake now, if I wanted the best cake easily available, it would be a box-mix cake.
