Walmart Quietly Perfected This Delicious Bakery Item You Might Be Overlooking

Walmart's bakery is best known for its seemingly endless options for customizing birthday cakes and cupcakes. However, there's another type of cake sold in the superstore that has garnered new attention from shoppers. Marketside Iced Lemon Loaf Cake is one of Walmart's bestselling bakery items, perhaps in part because it has been described on social media as a delicious and affordable version of Starbucks' popular Iced Lemon Loaf.

In general, lemon loaf cake is moist, citrusy, and sweet, often eaten at breakfast with coffee or tea or as a light dessert after dinner. The lemon cake sold by Marketside, Walmart's exclusive bakery brand, comes in a package of eight slices, each topped with a tangy lemon icing. It's worth noting that while Starbucks' lemon loaf is a thick pound cake with a dense, tightly packed crumb, Marketside's lemon cake is thinner, airier, and more bread-like in its texture.

One of the biggest comparisons made between the two lemon loaves is that one package of Marketside's cake costs $4.98 while just one slice of Starbucks' costs $4.25 (prices may vary based on location). Walmart is the clear winner when it comes to value, considering you can get a whole package for just a few cents more.

Walmart has a lot to offer in its bakery: from breakfast goodies and customized birthday cakes, to award-winning pumpkin pie and other fresh baked goods, such as its $1.50 French and Italian loaves that are baked fresh daily (prices may vary). Like the Marketside Lemon Loaf, many of these bakery items are winners, however, some fall short and might be better purchased elsewhere.

In a ranking of Walmart's best bakery items, Chowhound tasted and reviewed nine Marketside or Freshness Guaranteed baked goods, judging them on flavor, consistency, and whether or not they tasted homemade. We ranked the Marketside All Butter Croissants as the worst bakery item, finding them to be sticky and have a plasticky odor. Our reviewer also wrote that the croissants "taste like soggy potato bread more than a delicate pastry." Other items that received mediocre reviews include the Freshness Guaranteed apple pie, which lacked a buttery crust and had an unpleasantly gelatinous filling like typical store-bought pies, and the white cake with buttercream which was way too sweet, according to the Chowhound taste tester. 

On the flipside, the highest ranked bakery item was the Marketside Cinnamon Rolls, which, while the highest-priced item in the ranking, are well worth the purchase due to being plush and soft, not overly sweet, and having plenty of cinnamon filling. We actually didn't have one bad thing to say about these fluffy, well-iced cinnamon rolls. The Marketside Blueberry Streusel Muffins came in second, praised for their moist texture and fresh-tasting fruit.