Believe it or not, I wasn’t looking for any box mixes when I stumbled upon this strange mix. I was on a hunt for Hershey kisses at my local grocery outlet and couldn’t find them anywhere. I ran into a friend who worked there and he offered to check the back to see if he could find some. This left me standing in the middle of the store conveniently beside the baking aisle. Now my local grocery outlet is usually a miss for me when it comes to box mixes, they have some out of season products and some classics I can find in any store so imagine my surprise when I looked at the top shelf and found the strangest looking packaging ever that claimed to be an olive oil cake mix and the price tag said “$6.99 (elsewhere $29.99)”. I snapped a picture and decided it was the most absurd thing ever. $7 for a box mix is high but how could this sell anywhere for $30? I sat and contemplated awhile and since I still hadn’t heard back about the Hershey kisses, I caved. I didn’t want to leave the store empty handed so I grabbed the chocolate and espresso flavored mix and went home to research this brand.
It turns out, they weren’t kidding. This box mix is actually $25-$30 on various websites including Amazon and Crate and Barrel. Let me tell you a little more about this product that I learned while trying to justify the price. Elia is a fancy olive oil company. In the box mix, they include their organic olive oil. They also list the ingredients as “organic and non GMO”. Personally, this does nothing for me. I think if you are going to prioritize clean ingredients in your cake you should make a homemade cake. Box mixes are known for being convenient and full of preservatives. How else would you get a cake from water, oil, eggs, and powders? I guarantee homemade would be cheaper and produce many more cakes than one plus you would know exactly what is going into your cake and into your body.
The packaging for this cake mix is so strange because it is completely white with black writing and a bottle of sorts on the side to represent their olive oil. They filled most of the space with different texts to sell you on this mix and then include the tiniest little picture of a cake on the back of the box. I included the back of the box so you can take a look at this strange writing and imagery and see what I mean. I feel like they added in as many extra words as they could to make it seem fancier.
This box mix comes with powdered ingredients and a bottle of olive oil. You need milk and eggs to make the mix. It calls for a standard amount of each ingredient and yet they claim it only makes one 8inch round pan, not two layers like every other cake mix on the market. The recipe calls for using a few teaspoons of oil to grease the pan and then use the remaining oil in the batter. The batter came together like normal and looked like a regular consistency. I’m not surprised, plenty of cake recipes replace butter with vegetable oil and it leaves the cake more moist than butter so I am hopeful that is what the fancy olive oil achieves. The taste of the batter however, was terribly disappointing. Have you ever been disappointed by fancy dark chocolate when you learn it’s all bitter and not sweet? Turn that into a cake batter consistency and you have a solid idea of what this was like. It wasn’t sweet. The chocolate flavor was subtle and bitter and the espresso flavor was missing. Despite all this, I held out some hope that it would taste different baked.
I poured the cake batter into one single 8inch round pan and placed it in the oven to bake. Now here is where it started going wrong. That fancy verbiage I was telling you about confused me at this stage. The step that lists the bake time is written like this “Bake for 28 minutes. Rotate pan and bake for 15 minutes or until the center of the cake is set”. I misinterpreted upon first read, really it was more of a skim. I had decided it was to be baked for 28 minutes and rotated at the 15 minute mark. However, the cake was still batter at 28 minutes and I was flabbergasted at how they could be have missed the bake time so poorly. Re-reading the box and consulting others had me consider they may have meant bake it for 28 minutes, rotate it, and bake it for 15 minutes more totaling 43 minutes of baking. I hate that they don’t state “bake for 43 minutes and rotate halfway through” or include “more” after bake for 15 minutes. Maybe this mix wasn’t targeted for me and it was for a group of people who are fancier and read every word clearly while baking. I however feel as though I know what I’m doing when it comes to baking and am not reading mix instructions thoroughly. Maybe that was the problem here. However, after that debacle, at 43 minutes, the cake isn’t done. I kept adding more time to the timer and checking on the cake and at around 60 minutes the cake was finally cooked. How could they possibly have gotten the bake time 17 minutes wrong? I appreciate that they didn’t overshoot the bake time but that feels way too undershot to be realistic. What I thought would be a quick bake, turned into the longest wait time ever. I incorrectly thought this cake would bake in 28 minutes and so 32 minutes later I was mad at this cake and ready to give up. At this point, I am following the instructions word for word, no more inferring I know how to make a cake. The instructions said to let the cake chill in the pan for 10 minutes so I let the cake chill in the pan for 10 minutes.
Now here’s the next bone I have to pick. This cake isn’t meant for frosting. I can practically hear you screaming at your screen now “What?!” I know, I know, that concept should be illegal. Cake is meant to be frosted. If you don’t like frosting and want to leave it off, that’s your choice to do so knowing it will be inferior. This recipe says to serve the cake as is or sprinkled with powdered sugar. Remember how I told you the batter wasn’t sweet? I wasn’t taking any chances and went with powdered sugar. This made a gorgeous appearance but frosting would definitely look better.
I cut a slice of the sugar dusted cake and it had a nice crumb. It looked nice and moist, not too dense and not too light and airy, exactly as a good cake consistency should look so I feel the olive oil worked well for this. The flavor however, was impacted by the olive oil. The flavor was part mild bitter dark chocolate and part earthy flavor with absolutely no amount of sweetness baked into a cake. It really tasted like a chocolate cake where you had forgotten to put sugar into the batter before baking. The consistency was still great. But even the powdered sugar on top couldn’t help this disappointment. I had a house full of guests and couldn’t get more than a few bites eaten. Do me a favor and even if you’re curious, do not spend $30 on this box mix. Don’t even spend $7 on this box mix. I wouldn’t make this again if it was given to me for free. I don’t think I’ve ever had a worse tasting cake in all my years. Steer clear of this product, this is an olive oil company trying to branch out when they should just stick to their olive oil. I’m not an olive oil expert so I can’t even tell you if this is high end olive oil but I am a cake expert and you don’t want this box mix.
Wow, what a rough start to the new year! I’ve got a couple more mixes and recipes lined up that I have high expectations for but I’d love to hear if you have seen any mixes in stores or recipes online you’d like for me to test out here! I’m always looking for something new or unique. You can also share social media recipes with me on my Facebook and Instagram account, both named Bake Anything With Me. I’d also love to hear about which is your favorite type of post to see that you want more of. Thank you for coming into the new year with me and stay tuned for what’s next!
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