Best brand of cake mixes

When baking and decorating cakes what is the best brand of cake mix to use? What do you recommend?

Answer~

Cake mixes are great, and there are actually very few tricks to using them. You'll hear a lot of folks talk about adding sour cream or pudding, things like that. It's been my experience though that they really just aren't necessary.

The biggest thing when using a cake mix is to use Duncan Hines brand. For some reason their cakes taste better and bake better. I've always used their devil's food for my chocolate cakes and it's great. Their lemon cake is perfect as is. I thought I would be clever once and add lemon flavor to it, and it ruined it. :) For a plain cake, french vanilla is wonderful.

Another thing I've noticed is that the cake mixes tend to get more air bubbles than a homemade cake. So, just be sure and get the air bubbles out really well by dropping your pans on the counter several times.

The chocolate cake mixes tend to want to burn around the edges sometimes and stick to the pan. Just make sure your oven is running at the proper temperature. If you have any trouble with the cake getting too done around the edges, you may have to lower the oven temperature 25 degrees when making the chocolate cakes. I always give my pan a little extra pan coat when I'm making chocolate too.

That's all really. Cake mixes are just easy to use. I use them a lot because you can make them as-is with the exception of using the x-large eggs.