I have read so many great things about the mermaid bakeries vanilla butter cake recipe. so i decided to try it and i was not at all happy with the taste. i followed the recipe exactly. any recommendations. the cake turned out very very dense and a bit dry. i made sure not to over cook it. dont get me wrong the inside of my cake looks beautiful but i dont like the taste of it. any recommendation or good scratch recipes would be helpful.

First you have to decide if it is the taste or the texture of the cake that you dislike. Then work from there, scratch cakes tend to be heavier then a box mix. And if you have grown up on a mix you may just not care for a scratch cake. Taste is so subjective that you just have to keep trying until you find one that you like.

BTW: The cake looks beautiful.

I tried the recipe last summer and although it had a nice flavor, I thought, it was pretty dry. It was my first scratch cake, but most of the scratch cakes I've tried since then have had a very different texture than the cakes I'm used to, most drier. The mermaid cake had a very tight crumb. I've sort of given up on scratch yellow cake. I've wasted a lot of ingredients trying to get a really good one. I now use a WASC variation for my yellow cake and people go nuts over it-so as much as I'd love to be a scratch baker, I don't think the people buying my cakes would like it.

alanahodgson- thanks so much. i thought it might have just been me. i love baking from scratch so if i do find a fabulous yellow cake i will let you know. thanks again

i sometimes think that scratch cakes made with oil tend to have more of the moist cake-mix taste. try one of those and see what you think. although, i don't see yellow cakes made with oil very often, you never know! i think everything is out there somewhere! good luck! and don't be afraid to "cheat" with a cake mix every now and then!