Can you really make cake out of soda?

Is this ‘soda cake’ better than regular cake?

Video Transcript

DILLON THOMPSON: I've always heard that the secret ingredient to any dessert is love, but is it actually soda? This viral recipe says you can make an entire full-on cake with just two ingredients, and one of them is this thing. But does it actually work? To find out, we're going to try the recipe hack ourselves.

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So this soda cake hack has been around for a long time, but is going viral again, thanks to TikTok, where people are getting a box of cake mix from the store and pouring in one can of soda and making an entire cake or a batch of cupcakes, all with just those two ingredients. Somehow, this thing is supposed to taste just as good as regular cake. And it's technically lower calorie. So we're going to test this recipe out by making half of our box of cake mix the regular way and half the soda hack way and seeing what really tastes better. Let's do it.

First up, the soda way. So to do this, we're just going to combine half of our box of cake mix with half a can of soda. I chose to use sugar-free 7up to make it extra healthy. Now, the regular way. We're just going to follow the instructions on the box for this one. We're going to fill these into cupcake molds and stick them in the oven and see what tastes better. Our cupcakes are ready, and it's time to compare.

So we're going to test this soda cake hack on two points of criteria-- convenience and taste. For convenience, the soda cake is super easy to make. It's as easy as just pouring a can of soda into a box of cake mix, mixing it up, and tossing it in the oven. It's also technically cheaper because a can of soda is like less than $1. We're going to give it a 5 out of 5 for convenience here.

Next up, taste. I got two of my most well-decorated, best-looking cupcakes. I'm going to try them out and compare them. First, I'm going to try the regular cake recipe. Mm. Now I'm going to try the soda rcipe. Mm. Oh, my gosh. This tastes almost exactly the same.

If anything, it might taste a little bit better. It has some of this 7up lemon-lime flavor to it. So if you got some lemon cake and you want to spice it up, I'd really recommend using a soda that fits that flavor. These taste both amazing. They're fantastic cupcakes. It's hard to even tell the difference. I'm going to give this hack a 5 out of 5 for flavor.

All right, so tallying up our scores, we have great news for baking, but bad news for my soda addiction. Our soda hack cupcakes got a 10 out of 10 overall. That's the highest score possible, the highest score we've maybe ever given out in the show. This hack is incredible. I highly recommend using soda to bake cakes or cupcakes in the future.

And if you will, please come and take the soda from me because if this stuff sits around my house any longer, I'm going to fall deeply back into my soda addiction. In the meantime, I'm just going to have to eat my soda. Mm.