Curious about how the classic pound cake got its name? Simple: The original recipe called for a pound of each ingredient (of which there were only four). With such a simple and humble point of origin, you’d think even chain stores could nail the recipe, right? Tragically, that’s totally wrong. We ranked six store-bought pound cakes from worst to best and at the very bottom of that list is Walmart, which has given us a pound cake that hardly even classifies as a pound cake.
Walmart Bakery’s butter pound cake was a swing and a miss for us for plenty of reasons. The crumb was dry as expected, but the biggest failing was its sweetness level. A good pound cake shouldn’t be overly-sweet, with the richness from the butter and the notes of vanilla playing in harmony with the sugar. In Walmart’s pound cake, the other ingredients are completely drowned out by the saccharine sweetness, making for a dessert so overwhelmingly sweet that our taster didn’t eat more than a single bite. Not even a boozy bourbon makeover for basic pound cakes could save this sickly-sweet bake, which is why it’s the worst store-bought pound cake you could possibly grab, in our humble opinion.
How Walmart’s pound cake crumbled before competition
The biggest trends that tied our lowest ranking cakes together were the frankly grocery store quality of the flavor profiles. Grocery store cakes are almost all manufactured factory-style — not made to order in a secret industrial-grade kitchen tucked away beyond the prying eyes of shoppers. Though some baking may occur in the store, a lot of baked items are actually shipped in or simply heated up in an on-site oven from pre-made, frozen products. This means you’re naturally going to get some artificial-tasting treats every now and then, like those infamous pillowy sugar cookies with an inch of thick frosting. In pound cakes like Walmart’s, the artificial tastes overwhelm any of the flavors you actually want, like the butter and vanilla. Comparatively, our highest ranked cake, Entenmann’s, had a genuinely enjoyable flavor where the artificial notes took a back seat to the other ingredients.
To us, Walmart’s pound cake tasted more like a grocery store vanilla cake mix, just a little on the dry side. Plus, it had a disappointingly pale color as opposed to the rich golden hue of a good pound cake. To be perfectly frank, you might as well just make your own pound cake from scratch rather than spend any money on this flop (try adding ginger ale in your 7 Up pound cake for a light and fun surprise, even). That said, if your heart is set on picking up a grocery store pound cake, there’s still hope for you. There are other store-bought pound cakes like the top-ranking Entenmann’s and runner-up Drake’s Mini Pound Cakes that aren’t quite so tragic, so don’t give up on your hunt just yet. Just say goodbye to Walmart’s for the sake of your taste buds.
