Apparently the concept of "storing food" has also been lost.
Not to be flippant, but it sounds like grandma is using this as a convenient excuse to get out of baking. Or the learned-helplessness has reached epic proportions...
What the hell is someone going to do with an unusable fraction of boxed cake mix? Especially not an even fraction?
Like, come on, muster up the thought of a recipe that uses a can of, I dunno, coconut milk or something. For 50 years you could buy “1 can of coconut milk” and that was it. Open can. Add to ingredients. Cook. Done.
Now the can of coconut milk has been shrunk by 1.55ounces (inb4 durrr ur units are dumb, the problems exists if you measure in mL too) to increase profits and annoy you. Now to make your recipe, you have to scale by a stupid factor, or in your sage, genius advice no one apparently could’ve thought of on their own (what would we do without you!), but two cans, use up one completely, and use just 1.55oz of the next.
What the fuck do I do with the leftovers? Coconut milk isn’t exactly something you just drink alone. You can’t reseal the can. It’s gonna go bad before you want to make $RECIPE again. But hey, they got you to buy two cans, just so you can waste most of the second before you realize you were fucking swindled by some shitheel in loafers and a sweater vest with an MBA.
There are perishable ingredients emulsified in cake mix. Once you open the bag it has a very short useful shelf life. These are not hard concepts to understand.
The exact box in the article (it had a link!) has the following ingredients listed:
Enriched Flour Bleached (wheat flour, niacin, iron, thiamin mononitrate, riboflavin, folic acid), Sugar, Corn Syrup, Cocoa Processed with Alkali, Leavening (baking soda, monocalcium phosphate, sodium aluminum phosphate). Contains 2% or less of: Modified Corn Starch, Palm Oil, Corn Starch, Propylene Glycol Mono and Diesters, Monoglycerides, Salt, Dicalcium Phosphate, Sodium Stearoyl Lactylate, Xanthan Gum, Cellulose Gum, Carob Powder, Artificial Flavor.
Now I've been interested in cooking for 30+ years, and do all of our home cooking and baking, and there's no way I would believe that I can substitute typical from-scratch/pantry ingredients and get the same result.
Why are you limited to what's in your pantry? Just get the extra ingredients online.
The things you need from that list are Wheat flour (white), corn flour (starch), Sugar, Cocoa, Baking powder, Salt, Vanilla. I doubt carob adds anything that a spoonful of instant coffee wouldn't.
Now I get your point that it wouldn't produce the same result, but I'd be surprised if it produced a worse result.
Thing is, once something has been done a certain way, it becomes a tradition in its own right. It doesn't really matter how it got to be that way, but once people have nostalgia for it, they want to keep doing it the same way.