There are a couple of reasons why we substituted a cup of brown sugar in place of the cup of white sugar that many of our doctored cake mix recipes call for. The hint of brown sugar in this cake recipe matches up with the combination of flavors that we love so much in a chocolate chip cookie. As an added bonus, brown sugar adds additional moisture to cakes thanks to the molasses in the sugar. In some cases, you may need to reduce the amount of liquid to make up for the addition of brown sugar, but for today's cake, I had no issues with doing a straight substitution.  *We use brown sugar in our scratch Chocolate Chip Cake as well as our Chocolate Chip Pound Cake!