The 70-Year-Old Beloved Boxed Mix Grandmas Won’t Be Buying This Holiday Season
There’s a problem with boxed mixes, and it’s impacting grandmas’ most beloved recipes. At some point last year, shoppers noticed Betty Crocker cake mixes shrank (again), this time from 15.25 ounces down to 13.25 ounces. And while few people would ever argue for less cake, the 2-ounce decrease is weighing particularly heavy on grandmas.
Take my neighbor Judith (and grandma to two). Her chocolate crinkle cookies have been practically synonymous with our community potlucks for the past 15 years — and that’s only how long I’ve known her! It wasn’t until she suddenly stopped bringing them that I knew something was terribly wrong.
Why Grandmas Aren’t Buying Boxed Cake Mixes
Her cookie recipe — a box of Betty Crocker chocolate cake mix, two eggs, and ⅓ cup neutral oil — no longer works now that the box is a full 5 ounces smaller than its original 18.25-ounce size (a 27% decrease and textbook example of shrinkflation). What once yielded 24 consistently light, fluffy cookies now makes 20 goopy, lackluster blobs. The only thing that has changed? The box mix.
“It’s just so upsetting,” says Judith, whose cookie recipe was passed down by her mother. These “perfect little cookies” once made the rounds at bake sales, Christmas cookie exchanges, and birthdays. She now calls them “unusable.” She could buy an additional box to make up the difference, she acknowledges, “but out of principle, I just can’t.”
Judith isn’t the only one. She says that her other (grandma) friends are feeling the changes, too, and they’re not happy about it. Betty Crocker has empowered home cooks to make delicious desserts for over a century now. So it’s no surprise just how many cherished family recipes — involving that once familiar box of cake mix — have been passed down from generation to generation.
It’s not just cookies that are affected; beloved family dump cakes, crumbles, pancakes, and more all fall short because the cake mix is no longer the same.
To add to the frustration, one Redditor pointed out that the brand may have “tinkered with the amount of leaveners in the mix itself. … When [the cake] first comes out of the oven, it looks like a more substantial amount of cake but then shrinks as it cools down.” (We reached out to Betty Crocker to verify any ingredient changes and have yet to receive a response.)
Baking is indeed a science that needs precise measurements and consistency. Many home bakers, like Judith, find it disheartening to see decades-old cherished recipes forever changed by corporate decisions. I did, though, share our Chocolate Crinkle Cookie recipe with her so she can try to make new traditions.
This article originally published on The Kitchn. See it there: The 70-Year-Old Beloved Boxed Mix Grandmas Won’t Be Buying This Holiday Season
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