It’s hard to beat the convenience and ease of boxed cake mix. Take a walk down your local grocery store’s baking aisle and you’ll see dozens of brands and flavors, all designed to get cake on your table quickly. What started during the Great Depression as a way for a molasses company to move excess inventory has evolved into a market valued at over $1.6 billion in 2025. That’s a whole lot of cake mix! While yellow, chocolate, and funfetti mixes have serious staying power, there are other cake mix flavors that have come and gone in the nearly 100 years since the boxed products made their debut. One such discontinued cake mix flavor that you can’t buy anymore? Duncan Hines’ sour cream chocolate cake mix.
Introduced in the 1970s, this chocolate cake was described as having “the taste of sour cream right in the mix” in a TV commercial that put the cake to the ultimate test: It was given out to folks in Hershey, Pennsylvania, a.k.a. Chocolate Town, USA. Purported Hershey residents tasted the cake and had moderately enthusiastic reviews. “It’s very good. It’s chocolatey, it’s moist, and I wish I had made it,” said one woman. Another went in for a second bite, saying “I won’t be able to stop!”
While the tasters may have liked the cake, it wasn’t enough to keep it on store shelves. The cake didn’t last even a decade; it was discontinued in the 1970s.
What sets a sour cream chocolate cake apart?
While there’s not much description in the commercial about “the cake they love in Hershey, Pennsylvania” beyond the sour cream flavor in the mix, we can imagine what it might have tasted like — and recreate a similar cake using Duncan Hines more modern mixes…