The Store-Bought Frosting You Won't Catch Us Using On Any Cake

From achieving a moist crumb and crispy crust to pulling off clean, bakery-style icing, baking cake at home is no simple feat. There are plenty of clever hacks for upgrading boxed cake mix and making it taste homemade. The same goes for store-bought frosting — yes, you can improve it at home, but the starting point still matters. Some frostings just don't give you enough to work with at the get-go.

To figure out which brands are worth your time (and your cake), we taste tested and ranked seven popular store-bought frostings from worst to best. For each one, we tried both the chocolate and vanilla versions and sorted them based on flavor, texture, price point, and overall variety. A great homemade frosting is full of flavor without overpowering the cake too much, and has a texture that makes it easily spreadable without being runny or drippy.

When you're eating frosting straight off a spoon, it's hard to imagine being disappointed. And yet, Miss Jones Baking Co. managed to pull that off. From texture to flavor, this brand missed all the marks.

From the first spoonful, it was clear that Miss Jones Baking Co. came up short in every category. Because this is an organic frosting, the cost is already higher than most competitors. And, to add fuel to the fire, the cans themselves weren't even filled to the brim with frosting. That meant a higher price for less product, which doesn't sit right with us (or our wallets).

This brand is more health-focused than the others, free of hydrogenated oils and artificial flavors, which is commendable in theory. But let's be real — if you're eating a cake with frosting, is there even a point to making it healthier? Hydrogenated oils, while controversial health-wise, are part of what give classic frostings that creamy, indulgent texture and full-bodied taste. Without those oils or artificial flavoring, Miss Jones' chocolate frosting tasted mostly like coconut oil, and its vanilla flavor was so faint we wondered if any vanilla had been added at all.

The final contributing factor (the icing on the cake, if you will) was texture. This frosting was not the silky, spreadable frosting we'd choose to ice a cake. Chilled, it's dry and crumbly, and at room temp, the coconut oil gave it a weird, greasy texture. It's far from the fluffy consistency you'd expect from something you're paying top-dollar for.