Hello- I have been making the same doctored recipe for my sour cream cake for years and recently it has been tasting more dry.  I am not sure what is going on.  If i'm baking too long or if the company(Duncan Hines) has changed the recipe but it just seems more dry lately.  I changed the temp of my oven to a lower temp and baking the cake a few minutes longer.  Not sure if that makes a difference or not.  If someone can help me trouble shoot that would be great! I don't know all the science of the ingredients I use and what it does for my cake b/c maybe there is something that I do to my recipe that I need to do different.  I am also willing to try a new recipe like Sugar Geek's or My cake school. 

Do you have a doctored sour cream cake recipe you like?  I wanted to get your opinion to see if any of you use these recipes or your own doctored cake mix? 

Thanks!!

Sorry to take sooooo long to reply to you.  Hope it is still something you want to know about.

I am the creator/poster of the *original* WASC cake recipe.   It is on this site.  It, of course, is the only one I use :)   The ones you mention are knock-offs of my original one.  ( BTW: long back-story:    on another board recently there is a controversy about me making up the recipe.  Years ago I found a recipe in a cake magazine that  a women retiring  said she made it up some 30 yrs previous & used for her well known business of making wedding cakes.  some of the ingredients were no longer available so I came up with substitutes.  I 'created' the recipe as it now is .  On that other board a women I don't know called me a liar for saying I created the recipe. :(   It would not be the great cake recipe it is if I had not found/combined the right ingredients so I stand by my word that I *created the original* WASC recipe.   

  I don't eat/taste my cakes.  Almost always bake flat cakes that don't need trimming.  I bake exclusively now for cake4kids.com and use WalMart brand mix.  After much trial and error I found baking at the low 300 degrees F for the 1st 20-45 minutes depending on the size of the cake, then increasing the temp to 325 for an equal time results in a great moist, flat cake w/o that hump that gets thrown out.   

I think you are right that the companies are playing with the formulas again (and not saying anything) so we have to scramble to figure out what is going on with our bakes!   When I had my bakery I got requests from a couple companies to try a new formula that were thinking of changing to.  So I know that  'secret' type of changes do go on.    It's just going to be up to us to try to figure out what works best for us to compensate. 

Hope you haven't given up entirely on cakecentral and not see this at this late date.