I sencond this - a family friend of ours works at the local Giant Eagle bakery, or at least she used to. She used to make all my birthday cakes when I was a kid. They have good cupcakes too.
My kid works in a grocery store bakery. They bake whole cakes on site, from scratch. Not cracking eggs, that they get in pourable cartons. You can have regular Crisco “buttercream” or pay a lot more to have real buttercream. They also do the whipped cream icing, which is my favorite.
When she worked at a somewhat fancy bakery, they used Jiffy mixes for all cakes.
At the grocery store, the only things made fully in store are the bakery breads, artesian breads, rolls, and whole cakes. Everything else is premade.
The frosting my mom puts on her brownies is AMAZING - boiled fudge frosting! I would request those every year for my birthday. The frosting on bakery brownies is tasteless chocolate petroleum.
I wasn’t even talking about the frosting on bakery brownies versus the frosting on home-made brownies but the idea of frosting brownies at all. I don’t think I’ve ever seen that.
I have a (very) small business selling cakes and cupcakes so most people assume I’m a pastry snob. That’s definitely not the case as I have an insane sweet tooth and can appreciate most garbage food on some level. But I definitely do not care for 90% of cakes from a grocery store because the frosting is so waxy and artificial.
But not always! Kroger actually uses several different things to frost their cakes-- sometimes it’s the waxy Bettercreme out of a giant tub that I can’t stand. But sometimes it’s (American) buttercream which–despite being incredibly sweet-- is nostalgic and hits the spot once in a while. And sometimes it’s whipped cream (like, actual stabilized dairy cream) which can be very nice paired with a fruit filling.
Costco has a nice bakery section but I am generally not a fan of their decorated cakes. Sometimes you can see the giant tubs of shelf-stable frosting in storage beneath the display tables. Bleh!
I see a few people have made reference to Publix. I and everyone I know LOVES Publix baked goods in general, but especially their cakes. It’s such an automatic go to that I can’t recall the last time I had a store bought cake from anywhere else.
I don’t ever frost my brownies, and I don’t think it’s common to frost brownies, but I’ve seen it. Probably only on purchased brownies, not home made brownies.
I make a boiled fudge frosting for chocolate cake that is fabulous. We have it for almost every birthday celebration.
To me, cake is like sex or pizza: Even when it’s bad, it’s pretty good.
Sure, some cakes are better than others, but I’m not going to make any blanket statements about supermarket cakes or bakery cakes or homemade cakes. Quality will vary among all of these, and I’ll happily eat any of them.
One exception: A few years back, my sister-in-law served a vegan cake on her son’s birthday. That thing was inedible.
I don’t mind supermarket cakes at all, and I’ve had some very good ones, but my wife’s home-baked cakes are still the best.
Whereas to me most supermarket cake is actively unpleasant. I might eat a bite or two to be polite at a celebration, but then I’ll take it back to my desk and toss it in the trash.
Yeah, at work celebrations, I’ll try to get the smallest, most frosting-free piece I can find, and I usually don’t even finish that. I hate that horrible Crisco frosting. I won’t eat it. I don’t know if I’m a super-taster or whatever, but I can taste the preservatives in boxed cake mixes, too. So, generally, I just don’t eat much cake. When I cooked and baked a lot, I’d make scratch cakes, and it wasn’t all that hard! Really…only slightly more difficult than a box mix. Carrot cake is easy-peasy.
I think that’s more about your sense of smell than about being a super-taster. Super-tasting is more about being extremely sensitive to bitterness.
Now retired 30+ year supermarket baker here. I’m also a culinary school grad. I started back when most mainline supermarkets (think Kroger/Safeway) still did a fair amount of scratch baking. The change to factory-made/frozen product (called “thaw and sell” in the biz) wasn’t so much for cheaper ingredients as it was for keeping labor costs low. Baking is a science, and those in my age bracket were the last generation to learn OTJ. Stores don’t do that anymore. Like fast food, the lower the throughput, the more chance you can hire someone for pennies because it’s been reduced to a job nearly anyone can do. Doing it well, however, is a whole other ballgame because even if you’re “babysitting” as someone upthread mentioned, you still need to know some of the mechanics. A guide may say “take bread out of proofer after X amount of time” but if the proofer is old or cranky or whatever, you’re sure as hell not going to know that your dough hasn’t sufficiently risen. Ditto ovens. I still get questions from former coworkers as to the intricacies of either our oven or “why did this turn out like that?”
Most cakes are made in commercial bakeries and come in frozen. They are put together and decorated in-store. Decorating has rapidly become a diminishing skill (see labor costs above), so many chains have devolved “decorating” into just doing borders, maybe some streamers, and confetti (aka those little round colored sugar sprinkles). It’s also easier to train somebody to put together a, say “strawberry shortcake cake” than it is to make roses or to master airbrushing. We’d lost several very talented decorators over the years to this trend.
There are three types of commercial icing: Non-dairy whipped (basically commercial Cool-Whip), the super sugary “buttercreme” which I personally cannot stand, and the creamy/greasy “buttercreme” which has more of what we think of as buttercreme texture. The super sugary type is great for decorations because of the smaller ratio of fat. Older folk tend to go for the whipped type because it’s the least sweet of the three. Diehard traditionalists like myself go for the “buttercreme”. Some manufacturers nail the texture better than others. It’s also susceptible to ambient temperature changes. We used to move the buckets around from cold to warm areas depending on the season.
None of the chains around my way do wedding cakes. It’s just too labor intensive and the cost to hire somebody would be prohibitive.
And yes, I was more or less “strongly encouraged” to retire, meaning at the time I was making more per hour than the manager. I was transferred to a department that could “afford” me, as it were. It just happens to be Prepared Foods, which dovetails nicely with a lot of stuff I learned in culinary school. Do I miss it? You bet. It’s ingrained in me.
Now retired 30+ year supermarket baker here. I’m also a culinary school grad. I started back when most mainline supermarkets (think Kroger/Safeway) still did a fair amount of scratch baking. The change to factory-made/frozen product (called “thaw and sell” in the biz) wasn’t so much for cheaper ingredients as it was for keeping labor costs low. Baking is a science, and those in my age bracket were the last generation to learn OTJ. Stores don’t do that anymore. Like fast food, the lower the throughput, the more chance you can hire someone for pennies because it’s been reduced to a job nearly anyone can do. Doing it well, however, is a whole other ballgame because even if you’re “babysitting” as someone upthread mentioned, you still need to know some of the mechanics. A guide may say “take bread out of proofer after X amount of time” but if the proofer is old or cranky or whatever, you’re sure as hell not going to know that your dough hasn’t sufficiently risen. Ditto ovens. I still get questions from former coworkers as to the intricacies of either our oven or “why did this turn out like that?”
Most cakes are made in commercial bakeries and come in frozen. They are put together and decorated in-store. Decorating has rapidly become a diminishing skill (see labor costs above), so many chains have devolved “decorating” into just doing borders, maybe some streamers, and confetti (aka those little round colored sugar sprinkles). It’s also easier to train somebody to put together a, say “strawberry shortcake cake” than it is to make roses or to master airbrushing. We’d lost several very talented decorators over the years to this trend.
There are three types of commercial icing: Non-dairy whipped (basically commercial Cool-Whip), the super sugary “buttercreme” which I personally cannot stand, and the creamy/greasy “buttercreme” which has more of what we think of as buttercreme texture. The super sugary type is great for decorations because of the smaller ratio of fat. Older folk tend to go for the whipped type because it’s the least sweet of the three. Diehard traditionalists like myself go for the “buttercreme”. Some manufacturers nail the texture better than others. It’s also susceptible to ambient temperature changes. We used to move the buckets around from cold to warm areas depending on the season.
None of the chains around my way do wedding cakes. It’s just too labor intensive and the cost to hire somebody would be prohibitive.
And yes, I was more or less “strongly encouraged” to retire, meaning at the time I was making more per hour than the manager. I was transferred to a department that could “afford” me, as it were. It just happens to be Prepared Foods, which dovetails nicely with a lot of stuff I learned in culinary school. Do I miss it? You bet. It’s ingrained in me.
longhair75, I just wanted to let you know I made your grandma’s chocolate cake yesterday. (and get some posting practice on the new site)
I didn’t have vegetable oil so I substituted applesauce as recommended by the internet, and it turned out lovely!
Did you substitute 1 for 1 or some ratio?
Inquiring minds would love to know!
One to one. I could have used mayonaise but applesauce isn’t as messy to measure! Also cuts down on the calories so I can tell myself I’m eating healthy chocolate cake.
Dung_Beetle
I am glad you liked it. I would have never thought of applesauce. I will try that next time
It’s possible you’re seeing proof. ( Pardon the hilarious baking/ oven pun. ) I too see large industrial ovens in some supermarkets.
That does not mean that the cakes are baked on site from scratch. That could well mean that you’re watching ovens get used to bake pre-mixed and frozen cakes of various sizes, that are defrosted and finished in the ovens.
That could count for the funky taste. Not for the cruddy icing. -shrug- Cruddy icing is because of cruddy ingredients. I’ve been to large affairs where the baked goods, filling and icing were just astonishingly tasty, not too sweet, not coarsly crunchy, etc. Very fine baking.
You get what you pay for.