14 Duncan Hines Cake Mixes, Ranked

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Most home bakers have probably already tried Duncan Hines mixes. They are some of the most recognizable boxes in the baking aisle and produce a flavorful, fluffy, uniform crumb. They're also cheap — a 15.25-ounce package generally costs under $2, a similar price to Pillsbury and Betty Crocker and only nominally more expensive than store brands like Great Value. 

My local Walmart stocks a variety of Duncan Hines options, which sometimes makes it hard for me to pick just one when I want to bake a Saturday afternoon treat. So, I decided to rank all the flavors I could find, but chose to skip the five Duncan Hines Dolly Parton baking mixes. There were specific criteria in my mind while tasting: I wanted to find the cake that tasted the best without frosting. It also had to have a compelling texture, work with a variety of fillings, and appeal to a wide audience of cake eaters. Some friends at a dinner party and my kids also tried some of the cakes with me, and their opinions helped me come up with this list and the descriptions of the cakes.

Duncan Hines' Classic Yellow Cake Mix is a satisfactory product for the most part, but has one feature that gave it the worst ranking: it tasted like baking powder. The first bite was sweet, vanilla-y, and mildly eggy. Then, I detected the faint note of baking powder, which made the cake taste chemical. I checked the package's expiration date since older mixes can sometimes taste more metallic due to aging ingredients, but there was still a year left, so that wasn't the explanation.

This mix is still worth purchasing and making if you're making yellow cake. That being said, I enjoyed all the other Duncan Hines products more. The leavening in this cake would be more difficult to detect if you added a filling like strawberry jam or chocolate mousse. This yellow cake might taste particularly great as a tres leches cake soaked in cream, evaporated milk, and condensed milk.

The German Chocolate Cake Mix is sweet, soft, and boringly bland for the most part. It has the same glaringly obvious baking powder flaw as the yellow cake. The troublesome flavor is much lighter here than in the other mix, though. It may be that the cocoa covers the leavening.

Although the cocoa acts as a disguise, it doesn't successfully add much flavor or color. This cake gives the impression of a hint of chocolate, but has none of the bitter complexity that makes chocolate deliciously intense. Even the color is a light shade rather than a deep chocolatey brown.

There's a good reason for this cake to have such a forgettable flavor profile — homemade German chocolate cake is supposed to be smothered in rich frosting made from caramel, coconut, and pecans. So, this cake is fulfilling the intended role and would be an acceptable vehicle for that topping, but the taste lacks on its own.

Visualize Tang in cake form, and you will have successfully imagined the taste of Duncan Hines Orange Supreme Cake Mix. The biggest difference between the two products is that this cake tastes mostly sweet with no sourness, while the classic drink powder is tangier. The flavor is glaringly artificial, which I found disappointing because authentic cinnamon orange coffee cake made with whole real fruit is a personal favorite. The only fruit in this mix comes from the natural flavoring, citric acid, and orange juice solids listed as ingredients.

This cake's biggest positive is that it doesn't taste like baking powder as German Chocolate did. I was suspicious when I first added the wet ingredients to the dry mix because I detected a Play-Doh-esque scent. Baking made it go away, and the finished cake was decent. Next time I eat this cake, I'll cover it in a sour citrus glaze to make it taste more like real oranges.

Duncan Hines' Strawberry Supreme Cake tastes faintly of dried berries and is a charming hue. I usually dislike brightly colored food, especially when it contains dyes like this one, but something about this hue tickled me. I had been wondering if the crumb would look marbled like the picture on the box. Instead, I was pleased to cut a piece and find a wonderful, smooth orangish-pink under the lightly toasted outside. It is the perfect color to make a princess or unicorn birthday cake.

Although it tasted artificial, the flavor seemed more like real strawberries and more authentic than the orange cake. That meant a higher ranking for this product than the Orange Supreme. Still, sweet was the main flavor in this cake. It would have been far yummier with the tart taste of real fruit, though. Adding freeze dried strawberries is a hack to boost the flavor of strawberry cake. Alternatively, stirring in strawberry puree, jam, or frozen berries would have been other easy upgrades, but might change the texture.

The profound color of Duncan Hines' Red Velvet Cake Mix is its best characteristic. The tone is more stunning than the strawberry cake, and it tasted less artificial too. The flavor isn't memorable, though — simply sweet and lightly vanilla. That's because red velvet cake is meant to be visually striking. Meanwhile, the flavor should hint at chocolate with butter, vanilla, and a sour end note from buttermilk. Duncan Hines' version checks the box for aesthetics, but was missing the tang. It may have just needed the cream cheese frosting usually associated with this cake.

When I opened the bag, I was sure the pale beige powder would make an ugly cake. I felt surprised and hypnotized when I beat the wet ingredients into the dry. As the mix got wet, it turned deep red — a tone lighter than Bing cherries. The mixer pushed it around in pleasing swirls. This color-changing mix looks like magic, which makes it ideal Saturday afternoon entertainment for kids.

Duncan Hines' French Vanilla Cake Mix is boring — nothing makes it stand out in a good or bad way. I was worried it might taste like artificial vanilla, but the flavoring was just neutral and subtle. I wish the vanilla had been stronger. As it is, this cake would go with almost any kind of topping, frosting, coloring, or filling. Bakers could easily put additional ingredients like fruit, chocolate chips, or sprinkles in the batter.

The vanilla flavor in this cake might have been faint, but it was present; that is more than I can say for the red velvet cake, which didn't have a distinctive taste. Then, as much as I enjoyed the color of the red velvet mix, the lighter color of vanilla cake is far more versatile. So, if you need a mix to make cupcakes to decorate or batter to add food coloring to, this box would be a good option. 

When you bake the Moist Spice Cake by Duncan Hines, your whole house will smell like gingerbread. The flavor does not have the same peppery bite as the holiday cookies, though; rather, it tastes authentic, warm, gingery, and sweet — perfect for fall. It's that warm, full flavor that makes this a superior cake to the boring French vanilla and red velvet mixes. A piece of this one goes perfectly with a black coffee. Adding some cream cheese frosting would elevate it even further.

This cake mix accurately replicates a homemade spice cake's flavor, but has better texture and moisture. In my experience, spice cakes made from scratch taste lovely, but often have a heavy, dense, tough, dry crumb structure that makes them crumbly and hard to swallow. This mix makes a cake with the same lovely flavor, but also the fluffy, light texture of the other Duncan Hines products. I appreciated that.

When I shared cake with my friends after dinner, two of them mentioned how much they loved any kind of spice cake. I was worried they'd be picky about eating a box mix spice cake, but they gave this one their stamp of approval.

Duncan Hines' Lemon Supreme Cake Mix was a hit with several dinner guests who liked it even better than the spice cake and asked for seconds. That widespread approval is what earned this cake its place in the ranking.

I was expecting to smell lemon when I cut open the package while I was baking, but that wasn't the case. I had to get close before I noticed the scent. That's similar to the experience of taking a bite — lemon was there, but it wasn't the first flavor I noticed. Although the lemon in this was dim, it tasted more authentic than the orange and strawberry in the other cakes. Products with citrus flavoring can sometimes taste like cleaning products, but fortunately that wasn't the case here.

This mix tastes similar to vanilla frosting with a drop of lemon juice in it — it's sweet and has an essence of the fruit. One guest said this cake seemed like it was missing something, and that's exactly how I felt when I took a bite. I suggested the cake could be tangier or tarter, but my taste tester preferred the idea of adding frosting or glaze to make it more similar to the lemon cake he was used to.

Of all the Duncan Hines fruit-flavored cakes, the Pineapple Supreme was the most intense. As soon as I cut open the cake mix bag, I could smell pineapple scent wafting out. Where the lemon cake just gave the impression of lemon, this cake gets in your face with its pineapple flavor. With that bold of a taste, it's fortunate that the pineapple tastes authentic rather than artificial or chemical.

When I was baking, I worried that I might mix up some of the similarly colored cakes, and I was meticulous about labeling them so that wouldn't happen. For example, this cake looks almost identical to the yellow cake, so I was careful to keep them apart. My effort wasn't necessary with this particular cake — the pineapple scent and flavor were so obvious it is impossible to mistake it for anything else. That's what puts this cake over lemon and earned it a place in the top third of this list.

Three dinner guests loved the flavor of this cake, but also thought that it seemed odd to eat pineapple-flavored cake on its own. It needed something, which kept the cake from getting an even higher ranking. My friends recommended adding chunks of crushed pineapple or that it would be perfect for a pineapple upside-down cake recipe instead of making the batter from scratch.

Duncan Hines' White Cake has the blandest, most neutral flavor of all the mixes. That's a good thing, in this case, because that's what white cake is meant to taste like. It's an empty canvas for adding food coloring, fillings, add-ins, and any sort of frosting.

This mix is well made since it doesn't taste chemical or artificial. That's an achievement when producing such a simple flavor–plain tastes make it easier for unwanted flavors to come through. That purity made it superior to the vanilla and fruit-flavored cakes since they all tasted slightly artificial. On the other hand, this cake could easily become authentic-tasting pineapple cake by using pineapple juice instead of water. The same goes for lemon and orange. No matter what, though, this cake needs something mixed in or put on top of it. It just doesn't taste satisfactory on its own. That, and its bland taste, kept it in about the middle of the list.

The Perfectly Moist Carrot Cake has the most interesting texture of the Duncan Hines mixes, and that means it's also one of the most satisfying to eat. It includes tiny bits of dehydrated carrot which give it an authentic flavor and feel. It wasn't as delicious as a homemade carrot cake mixed from scratch, but my dinner guests agreed that if you're not in the mood to grate carrots, this box is a win.

I wasn't sure how carrot cake from a mix would turn out because I've only ever made it from scratch before. The powdered mix looked odd with pencil-tip-sized orange flakes in it. When I added the wet ingredients, it got lumpier and thicker than most of the other batters. The thickness could have been due to the fact that the dried carrot flakes soaked up some of the liquid from the milk, but it didn't have a negative impact on the final product, which was perfectly moist.

The final flavor of this cake is a mix of butter, spice, and sweet carrots. Usually, this dessert would come with cream cheese frosting as well, but this cake was so good, no one missed or asked about it. That makes this a more successful box mix than the pineapple and lemon cakes, which both seemed to be missing either real fruit or frosting.

The Great Pumpkin Bundt by Duncan Hines has an advantage that the other mixes in this article didn't — it comes with glaze in the box. That may be one of the reasons this cake is also a little more than twice the price. The extra smooth texture, reminiscent of pumpkin pie, makes it worth it. The crumb was dense with smaller air bubbles than the other pillowy cakes. It tasted similar to the Thanksgiving treat, too.

Adding the glaze was the worst part of this mix. Making it was fun — the white powder turned bright orange as soon as I added water. It was too thick, though, even after carefully measuring. I was scared to add more water because glazes can get too runny quickly. The instructions said to pour the glaze on, but I spread it. A spoonful by itself tasted bitter, and I worried it might ruin the cake, but it complemented the cake's flavor perfectly.

Originally, I planned to rank this cake lower, but something had me coming back for more. After taste testing, I had leftovers of all the cakes. For dessert or a snack, I'd cut myself a piece. I most often returned to this one, and it's the first I personally finished. It's because this Bundt is a more complete product than the carrot cake and others lower down on the list — the spot-on pumpkin flavor, glaze, and smooth texture work together amazingly.

There may have been bias at play when I ranked Duncan Hines' Devil's Food Cake since chocolate cake is usually my favorite. It was easy to love this one, though. The flavor was more intense than the German chocolate cake. The color was darker and richer. A hint of bitterness in this one made it seem more authentically chocolate. It didn't taste as milky or watered down as the other one.

This cake doesn't need frosting or filling like many of the cakes lower on the list—eating a piece alone is a perfect treat. Anyone so inclined, though, might want to simply adorn it with some whipped cream to keep things from getting too intense. On the other hand, chocolate-lovers with no fear would probably enjoy this cake covered in a chocolate ganache.

While I may have personally eaten the pumpkin cake most quickly, I didn't even get a chance to finish off this cake. Between my kids asking me for more pieces and my taste testers who also appreciated this one, I didn't even have any leftovers.

Duncan Hines' Butter Golden Cake Mix tastes cozy and warm. Since the instructions call for butter rather than oil, it has a superior texture to all the other mixes. The batter is thicker and, then, when baked, rises higher. The crumb is lighter and fluffier with larger air bubbles, but also crumblier. The upper crust gets toastier. Sometimes using butter rather than oil makes cake dry, but that wasn't the case here. The flavor is slightly salty from the butter, and that brings out the sweetness of the mix.

Even though this cake has a simple flavor, it is not bland. The taste is complex enough that no frosting or filling is necessary, although adding some wouldn't detract from the cake. That makes this product versatile, and you could decorate it for a birthday or leave it plain to accompany coffee. You could even add in fruit puree or juice to make other flavors with the same delicious buttery taste and texture. Of all the cakes, this one will appeal to the widest audience, and that makes it superior to chocolate, pumpkin, spice, or any other flavor. 

I baked all the mixes in an afternoon to try them at the same time. I followed the instructions, but made half of each, so I weighed 7.5 ounces of mix from the baggies and added 3 ounces of eggs (1 ½ eggs). I cracked all 21 at once, lightly beat them together, and added egg by weight. The exception was the Great Pumpkin Bundt, which called for two eggs. I baked four cakes at a time on the middle shelf at 350 F for 25 minutes. I used disposable 8-by-8-inch aluminum pans for most and a Bundt pan for the pumpkin cake as indicated in the instructions.

I ranked the cakes according to my taste, but considered the thoughts of my kids and dinner party guests. The pineapple, lemon, carrot, and spice were pushed up higher in the ranking because I noticed how much other people enjoyed them. 

There were some characteristics that automatically raised or lowered a cake's ranking. Any that tasted bland, artificial, or like baking powder got low rankings. Cakes that tasted acceptable, but needed frosting, fillings, or other add-ins were in the middle of the list. The highest-ranked had authentic flavors and tasted great on their own. The cakes that people ate up most quickly got higher rankings.