Getting good cake seems really difficult in the US. I don’t know how it got this bad*. Other countries have decent patisseries. Somehow things went wrong here, and good bakeries are hard to find. I recollect a local bakery that everyone seemed to love when I was growing up, but the love was inexplicable as it had the same crappy mass-produced cake as everyone else. (*Though I blame cake mixes and the 1950s mass-produced, advertising-driven food standardization for all this. They seem to have destroyed America’s existing cake culture.)
Which is why I bake my own. The problem with that is, you have to have good recipes, but also a willingness to eat a certain number of failures before you get the hang of baking. But at least those failures are likely to be better than store-bought cake.
And it’s exactly like the cake sold so many other places. It’s so weirdly standardized, like everyone agreed to use exactly the same horrible recipe. Presumably it’s the recipe that’s most easily mass-produced, using the cheapest-possible ingredients, over-sweetened to average American tastes.
