Give Boxed Cake Mix A Bakery-Quality Finish With This Easy Ingredient Swap

Boxed cake mix is delicious, dandy even. These convenient, prepackaged baking kits are perfectly engineered to produce great, flavorful results with little effort. Even so, people are consistently working to come up with ways to enhance their boxed confections. From stirring in pudding mix, to adding your mix to a dump cake (it's tastier than it sounds), optimizing these confections has become a craft in and of itself. Sometimes, however, the simplest changes are the most impactful. With this in mind, we have one highly effective swap to try next time you make cake from a boxed mix: use butter instead of vegetable oil.

Most boxed cake mixes call for vegetable oil since it's neutral, makes for a moist cake, and can be used with no fuss or preparation. Butter, however, can bring a lot more flavor, offering a rich creaminess and complexity that vegetable oil simply can't provide. Plus, you don't need to do any baking calculus; just add the same amount of melted butter to your batter as you would vegetable oil, and stir. The resulting cake is more flavorful and has a denser texture. It's perfect for anyone who wants their cake to taste just a bit more homemade.

Adding melted butter isn't just a simple way to elevate a basic cake mix. It also opens up a whole big, beautiful, buttery world of possibilities. If you want to amp up the nutty, buttery flavor of your cake, for example, use brown butter instead of melted butter. The toasted milk proteins give your cake added depth and richness that's otherwise lacking. Keep in mind, however, that browning butter evaporates some of butter's water content, so add slightly more butter than what the boxed recipe calls for (about 1-2 additional tablespoons should do the trick). It's a great addition to a vanilla or yellow cake, though it also works well in a chocolate cake.

You can also use ghee to add a similarly rich flavor, which needs no adjustment in quantity. Simply melt and mix in. If you're not a fan of the dairy-based fat source, there are a ton of other oils and fat you can use for your boxed cake mix in place of plain old vegetable oil. So, get to mixing!