From Trader Joe’s bakery aisle comes two cake mixes — Golden Yellow and Chocolate — and two frosting mixes — chocolate and white. I had in mind baking a golden yellow cake with coconut frosting into the cart when the yellow cake and the white frosting mix. Typically, I don’t purchase frosting mix because you’re essentially just buying flavored confectionery sugar and you can do that well enough on your own, but I gave it go and wasn’t disappointed. The frosting was light, fluffy, flavorful, and totally devoid of that terrible “raw confectionery sugar” taste. The “pros” stop there, I’m afraid. While I had high hopes for the cake mix, it was a total dud in my book. I was encouraged by the all-natural ingredients, each of which identifiable and pronounceable — unbleached flour, dried cane syrup (i.e. raw sugar) and buttermilk. You add your own eggs, water and oil or butter, mix and bake. Typically I would make any golden or yellow cake with butter, but this was an unknown horse in the race, and I wasn’t willing to devote an entire stick of butter, when I only had two in the house, to this mix, so I opted for the oil instructions. Further, if a mix gives instructions for either-or, I presume the results will be equally successful, with the only downside being the absence of a buttery taste. I was making up for it with the frosting. Or so I thought. This cake, following directions precisely, was dense, heavy, oily, gummy, with no tender crumb. We didn’t know what we were getting into, when we frosted it, so we whipped up the white frosting, slathered it and the coconut on, and dove in. Ahem. We ended up eating the golden brown edges and corners in order to avoid the thick, gummy, yellow oily cake guts, and then, in an to-date-unheard-of move, scraped the entire cake into the rubbish bin. I’m quite confident this would fare better with butter rather than oil, but it’s not going to get another chance from me because it was too horrid to take the risk again. There are too many perfectly fine — nay excellent — natural cake mixes on the market to bother with this one.