7 Canned Frostings To Buy And 6 To Avoid

Canned frosting is not only a timesaver but a real problem solver for home bakers who don't have extra minutes in their busy lives to whip up a bowl of homemade cake topping or might lack the confidence to produce frosting from scratch. When your baked creation calls for frosting instead of icing and you head to the grocery store or big-box retailer to find a solution in a can, you'll be faced with an overwhelming number of choices, and not all of them will be favorable. Depending on the cake you've made, you'll want the right type of frosting to suit your recipe, as well as a flavor that adds to the experience rather than detracting from what you've baked. Wouldn't it be nice to know which canned frostings will top your cakes best and which are better off staying on the shelf?

We chose a selection of canned frostings from the biggest names in the business — brands like Betty Crocker, Pillsbury, and Duncan Hines, plus a few "Great Value" choices from Walmart's home label. We peeled back the tops and tasted to see how each one measured up. To choose our cans, we peeped reviews on grocery stores and company websites, gauging reviews and ratings, then hit the stores to grab a baker's dozen. After tasting, we sorted them into which to buy and which to avoid. Here's the spread on the best and worst frostings we tasted.

The Pillsbury Dough Boy stands proud on the label of Pillsbury Strawberry Frosting, a sure sign of confidence from the company that brings you Toaster Strudel and Pop'n Fresh Croissants. Strawberry is a unique offering in the canned frosting world, a stand-out among racier flavors that begs to be taste-tested. The trouble with a less-embraced flavor is the possibility of artificial flavorings turning the strawberry essence into something weird and unfavorable. 

Sadly, Pillsbury's take on strawberry spread fails to sidestep the strange-taste stigma. The initial notes are similar to Crunch Berries, our reviewer's favorite sugar-loaded breakfast cereal. The nostalgic essence quickly dissolves into something less delightful, however, with a dirty undertone that makes us sorry we gave this one a go. But living is learning, and in this case, we've learned that you should avoid Pillsbury Strawberry Frosting unless you have no other options. Making your own vanilla frosting and flavoring it with a spoonful of strawberry preserves would give you something simple and much more delicious to frost your finished cakes. This ill-advised pick should never make it out of the strawberry patch.

Cream cheese frosting is like vanilla frosting's tangier risk-taking older sibling. It's versatile enough to fit on just about any flavor cake you can come up with while adding its punchy zing to make things feel a bit more special. It's great on carrot cake, perfect on rich chocolate cupcakes, and even makes a fun dip for fresh fruit and vanilla wafers. Pillsbury Creamy Supreme Cream Cheese attempts to package a formula that elevates the home baking scene, making simple work of adding smooth layers of something more flavorful than just another buttercream concoction. But real cream cheese is a complex blend of tasting notes, especially when incorporated into fresh frosting. Could it possibly come through as lusciously in a pre-made canned frosting?

Not even a little bit. This so-called cream cheese frosting is just another vanilla poser, offering nothing but bland sweetness instead of the elegant composition so familiar to real cream cheese frosting. Maybe the idea of adding yet another vanilla frosting to the sugary landscape was too boring for Pillsbury, so they tinkered a bit to come up with this misstep. They should keep tinkering, and you should steer clear of this can of disappointment.

Fans of vanilla frosting may find themselves drawn to Great Value Vanilla Frosting while perusing the choices in the Walmart baking aisle. A classic flavor that serves as a blank slate for a fancier cake underneath must be pretty difficult to flub, right? It's vanilla, after all, the plainest of the plain flavors, so much so that it's become synonymous with "bland". A store-label version made by the world's largest retailer should be a slam dunk. With a more cost-effective price point than the bigger names on the market, it should also be an exciting prospect when baking on a budget, shouldn't it?

Well, it is and it isn't. Sure, the price is enticing enough to draw your eye and keep you considering your options. But we cracked open the can to find a fully average, oily frosting that left an unpleasant mouth coating. If you're into vanilla, you'd be sure to notice the artificial flavor that sits on your tongue like a bad baking dream. But by the time all of that happened, you'd have already spent your frosting allowance on a mistake you can't take back. Aren't you glad we did the tasting for you and saved you the trouble?

Keto-friendly foods have made their way into many sections of the grocery store, so it was inevitable that a keto-friendly frosting would hit stores at some point. Duncan Hines jumped into the mixing bowl and created Keto Friendly Chocolate canned frosting for sweet fans who love to indulge without veering off of their eating path. It's exciting to think there's a way to have desserts that stick to the rules of Keto. But unfortunately — if this product is anything to go by — the notion of a food-plan frosting falls apart when it leaves the drawing board and hits the baking aisle.

This is likely one of the worst attempts at canned frosting we've ever tried, and easily the worst of the ones we chose to sample for this list. It's hard to say which is worse: the texture that's hard and waxy and doesn't dissolve properly on the tongue, or the dirty chocolate flavor that feels like all the happiness has been drained away. It's difficult to imagine even strict Keto followers figuring out how to get this tough bucket of clay to spread evenly on anything soft, let alone a cake. Keto? More like Ket-no.

Betty Crocker Rich and Creamy Coconut Pecan uses buzzwords that give an instant impression of superior quality. Who could resist a canned frosting that labels itself in such a confident manner? We couldn't, which is why we added it to our shopping list. We know our frostings from top to bottom, and coconut pecan is a specialty flavor reserved for German chocolate cake, spicy autumn sponges, and even carrot cake on occasion. The texture is so much a hallmark of the frosting that it can be a love-hate situation for dessert fans who favor a smoother spread on their sweet treats.

It's not a clear win for this can, due in large part to the excessive sweetness surrounding the coconut and pecans. A less sugary iteration might allow the nutty flavor to shine through more and push the caramel-like brown sugar glaze further back. But the off-kilter components come up short and too sweet, overwhelming any taste buds that might be hoping for something more subtle. It turns out a frosting can be too rich and creamy for its own good, and you might do better with a less syrupy canned frosting with coconut flavoring and some crushed pecans added by hand.

With so many versions of canned frosting on the market, a flavor like Betty Crocker Rainbow Chip might seem overly simple or tailor-made for a younger crowd. But who doesn't love finding multi-colored flecks of sugary joy topping a birthday cupcake or cut-out cookie, even if there's no special occasion to celebrate? The fun visual kick of having a spectrum of chip-like candies embedded in the frosting also means less decorating work. Sprinkles and frosting mixed should be an easy win for home bakers looking to jazz up their repertoires.

So what goes so wrong with Rainbow Chip that we tossed it directly into the "avoid" category? It isn't the frosting necessarily. This recipe is a perfectly passable vanilla cream, no better or worse than any other vanilla frostings we tried. However, the chips are absolutely the downfall of this festive spread. There's no discernable flavor, and the texture is so waxen and sticky, it's like eating broken crayons sprinkled throughout the can ... only crayons would have more taste than this. Our advice: go with another vanilla frosting and take an extra 30 seconds to throw on some sprinkles instead.

To gather our selections for this feature, we looked into the product ratings on store sites where the frostings are sold to get a sense of what consumers thought were some of the best and worst options from the many that are available. Then, we purchased flavors we thought would provide the greatest variety of quality and taste-tested them personally to decide for ourselves. We considered a few elements in the testing process, including taste, texture, versatility, and how easy they are to use on your home bakes.