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If y’all use a decent box mix and use melted butter instead of vegetable oil, an extra egg, and milk instead of water, no one can tell the difference. I sure as hell can’t. 

Also, if you add a little almond extract to vanilla cake, or a little coffee to chocolate cake, it sends it through the roof. 

Baking from scratch means you’ve got to buy a whole tin of baking powder and only use a spoonful, and a whole thing of flour, and maybe multiple kinds of sugar, and maybe cocoa powder, maybe spices, and there’s no way you’re going to use up any of those, you’ll just have to pitch them when you move out.

Not to mention that you’ve got maybe one measuring cup, and there’s no way you’ve got a sifter, and you probably don’t have measuring spoons and how sure are you that your eating spoon is actually the right size…

I bake some things from scratch. Anything requiring creaming a mix is basically a sad joke because all the work is the creaming. Standard cake is not one of them.

Of course, me being me, a standard cake is usually just a component - I don’t actually like “just cake” that much and canned frosting is terrible. So while I don’t scratch bake cake, that cake is getting saturated with tres leches, or put in a trifle, or getting add-ins before baking anyway.

In taste tests they’ve found that while customers may ask for a cake from scratch they often end up preferring the taste and texture of the doctored mixes when all is said and done.

Unless you have some particular allergies or some other reason to avoid box mixes they are often the better way to go.

I’ve been looking into opening up a home bakery and part of the task of producing food for the public is making sure your items are standardized so that every person who gets a cupcake (for instance) is getting the same quality, size, etc., etc.

My standard cake is box mix + milk for water + melted butter for oil + dash vanilla extract + frosting from scratch. This really seems to hit the right spot for people of “mmm, homemade” but also “exactly like Mom used to make.” (Do that for a yellow cake with chocolate buttercream frosting, add candles, and serve to a college student, for the maximum “this is exactly what I didn’t want to admit I wanted” potential.)

Seconding the addition of coffee to chocolate cake; a tablespoon of instant coffee powder in a dark chocolate cake makes it taste chocolatey-er without actually adding a perceptible coffee flavor (I don’t like coffee flavor, personally, and I still do this).

Another good option is a box lemon cake mix plus maybe 3 lemons. Zest the lemons, set the zest aside, then juice them and use that in place of the water; then use the zest to flavor the frosting. Adds a nice fresh kick.

Chocolate chips can be dumped straight into chocolate cake mix without fussing with anything to compensate. Sprinkles can go into white cake mix to make your own “confetti cake” with any specific color combo you like. Any kind of dried fruit can be chopped to raisin-size, soaked in hot water (or, better yet, hot juice with a couple of citrus peels added) for an hour, drained, and then added to batter.

Replacing part (up to maybe 1/3) of the water with yogurt (and then the rest with milk as usual) will give you a denser cake; make sure to check if it’s cooked through, and bake a little longer if necessary.

Swirling things through batter for that fancy marbled look is easy. Consider melting chocolate chips with butter, or mixing brown sugar with cinnamon and a little melted butter, or making up two different cake mixes and swirling those together.