Duncan Hines sells “Classic Yellow”, “Lemon” and “Golden Butter” cake mixes. You can have a cake without icing, but you can’t have a cake without cake; so obviously chocolate icing does not make a cake “chocolate”.
I always called yellow cakes “golden cake”, except for pound cake and lemon cake. With chocolate icing, if applicable.
I would never use a boxed lemon cake. I make my lemon cakes using a box of golden cake mix and a packet of instant lemon pudding. And no frosting, either. It’s baked in a Bundt pan and drizzled with a lemon-sugar glaze (and the lemon in the glaze is optional, it CAN just be a sugar glaze).
Come on then. If you come on the 15th, that’s my son’s 18th birthday. We’ll be haivng BBQ ribs, pasta salad and corn on the cob. With spice cake to follow (also strawberry shortcake for my dad who’s diabetic.)
Gotta go with crowd. Yellow cake with chocolate icing is just that. Chocolate cake is chocolate cake. Is that so hard?
My Mama’s peanut butter icing, which of course would make said yellow cake a “Peanut Butter Cake”. Again I ask, is that so hard?
Another vote for cake made from scratch. You people referring to cake as something made from a mix have no idea what cake is, so it doesn’t really matter what you call it. Chocolate cake comes in many guises, but it is made with real chocolate (70% cocoa content minimum), just as lemon cake is made with real lemon juice and zest, and coffee cake DOES taste like coffee, because - surprise! - it’s made with real coffee.
Look, you insufferable cake snobs: Cake mix cake is a type of cake in and of itself. For a lot of us, it’s a comfort food like any other. It makes me think of childhood birthday parties and cupcakes. I like it. And my foodie credentials are unassailable.
p.s. Ever had a bunny cake for Easter? You bake the cake mix in 2 rounds–use whatever flavor floats your boat. Then you put one on a large cookie sheet. You cut the other round into 2 ears and put them above the first round. (If you’re really careful, you can turn the remaining scraps into a bow tie. Or you can just eat 'em.) Then you frost it with some kind of white store-bought frosting. You usually need more than one tub. Once it’s frosted, you take some of that store-bought sweetened shredded coconut and stick it all over the frosting for fur. Then you make a bunny face with some jelly beans. It’s yummy.
If one were to ask me “would you like a chocolate cake?” My first question would be " What kind of frosting?" (Chocolate lover that I am, it wouldn’t make a difference to whether I said yes or no, but I’d like to know) A chocolate cake can have vanilla frosting, or chocolate frosting, or butter cream frosting…Simply saying “chocolate cake” is missing information unless it doesn’t have frosting at all.
The frosting flavor is no way to decide what kind of cake it is, but it’s important enough for its own mention. The proper question is, "would you like a piece of yellow[or golden] cake cake? It has chocolate frosting, " or “Would you like a piece of chocolate cake? It has vanilla frosting.”
I’m from the greater Birmingham area, and a yellow cake with chocolate frosting is a yellow cake with chocolate frosting. A chocolate cake is a cake that has chocolate blended right into the batter. I’ve never heard of a yellow cake being offered as chocolate cake. As a confirmed chocoholic, I think I’d be mad! But as a genteel Southern Lady, I’d never say anything to the hosts.
This thread is useless without recipes. All the cake snobs need to post their favorite cakes recipes, stat!
CrazyCatLady will have to come back in to give you her recommendations, but mine would be to add about 1/2 to 1 tsp of PURE vanilla extract to the mix. It covers up the yucky artificial taste that comes from the artificial vanilla flavoring that pretty much all manufacturers use, since it’s cheaper.
Green Bean: I’ve done the bunny cake, too. It’s very easy, but really, really cute. I think the Baker’s coconut people put out the directions for it every year. Unfortunately, my kids think that coconut is the devil’s own creation, so I’ve never made one for my own kids. 
Another one here who finds this thread amazing. Of course cake is defined by the kind of cake it is. The frosting doesn’t matter in the least. I’m over 50 and never in my life before now have I run across people who would call a yellow cake “chocolate” just because of the icing. And like everyone else who was brought up in this tradition, I feel that shunning, as the Amish do, is the only proper response for anyone who could do anything so heinous.
When parties are held around here, it’s a matter of common courtesy to order a sheet cake that is half chocolate, half white (actually yellow), with common frosting on which the message is written. How would the frosting people describe this?
I’m surprised that people haven’t been volunteering where they grew up. (Upstate New York for me.) This sounds like something that the Dictionary of American Regional English needs to look into.
I’m with you until there. Coffee cake is not named because it tastes like coffee. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever had a coffee cake flavored with coffee. It’s named as such because it’s meant to be served with coffee. Just like tea biscuits or teacakes are not named because they contain tea, but are served along with them.
Nope - leftover frosting in a can goes on saltines. Especially Rainbow Chip frosting - yummy! When we were kids and together on vacation, my cousins and I would buy the frosting just for the saltines - no cake necessary!
Susan
Oooh, tricky. I would expect a coffee cake to be coffee flavoured, but a teacake to be served with tea rather than containing it.
I make both from-scratch cakes and box-based cakes. I’d recommend The Cake Doctor (I think the author’s last name is Byrn) - she has any number of fancy recipes that begin with boxed cake mix. I just made a triple-decker strawberry cake (that would be strawberries in the cake *and * the frosting, people 
) for my best friend’s birthday and it was a big hit. Caveat: sometimes her recipes call for too much oil. I usually halve it, at least.
If you’re making chocolate cake from a mix, just adding additional cocoa powder ( 2 T. to 1/4 cup) can get rid of the “cake mix” taste. I almost never use canned frosting (I like whipped cream frostings - mmm!), but if I must, I mix in a 1:1 ratio of cream cheese, or more. Too sweet otherwise.
Enjoy!
Some interesting and enlightening responses in this thread. Apparently I’m something of an anomaly in my cake-naming, just as I am in so many other areas of life.
I asked my lovely and talented wife, Aries28, about the cake name Friday night, and she agreed with the majority here – yellow cake with chocolate icing isn’t called chocolate cake. Got the same response from my mother-in-law over the weekend, although she said she has often shortened the name to “chocolate cake” rather than use the longer “yellow cake with chocolate icing.”
I must admit to some confusion, though:
And yet, in the same post, in response to a question “what other type of icing would you put on a yellow cake”:
Why is it putting peanut butter icing on yellow cake automatically makes it a peanut-butter cake, but putting chocolate icing on a yellow cake doesn’t automatically make it a chocolate cake?
I noticed this too, but I have no trouble with it. No cake that I’ve ever heard of uses peanut butter in the cake batter - I’m sure it’d play havoc with the consistency. Thus, there’s no possibility of confusion. I’d think of it, rather than as a cake with frosting, as a specific cake recipe. Like German chocolate cake - it’s not the same cake if you don’t make the topping. I can accept “peanut butter cake” as a specific confection rather than simply the sum of layer cake and frosting.
Still don’t want any.
Still horrified at the thought of people - apparently routinely - making cakes from mixes. Sure, for a kid’s birthday party, where the attendees are unlikely to care. But the mix cakes are not like actual cake (and it’s consistency more than the flavor.) The idea of a cake mix cake being anything other than a last-minute response to a confectionary emergency makes me fear for the future of humanity.
I’m horrified that people are so snobbish about the “cake issue.” I doubt I’ve ever had a cake made from scratch. ever. Frosting made from scratch yes, but who has time to make a cake from scratch? No one I know, and I don’t think the majority of people have the time, either.
How much longer does it take to make a cake from scratch? Two minutes maybe? The only difference would be that you have to measure the flour and sugar. And the results are so much more delicious!
It may sound intimidating when you hear “from scratch” but honestly, it’s really simple! The longest thing in baking a cake is the actual baking part, but you’d have that with a mix cake too. It takes me maybe ten to fifteen minutes to make a cake and pop it in the oven.
The most annoying part of making a cake (to me) is greasing and flouring the pans. But you’d do that with a mix cake too, so no difference there. The rest is just easy peasy!
I’ll admit that growing up, we always called yellow-cake-w/chocolate-icing “chocolate cake.” This is probably due to the fact that we never had actual chocolate cake (or it would be referred to as “Devil’s Food Cake”). The only cakes I remember having growing up were ice cream cakes, wedding cakes, and “chocolate cake”.
Not being much of a cake person in general, I really didn’t eat much cake when I left home to live alone, but early on, I think I knew what “actual” chocolate cake was (though I very rarely ate it). I just thought of the term “chocolate cake” as a shorthand for the yc-w/cf combo, though I don’t apply it or assume it as such today.