Cakes

From tender sponge and buttery pound cakes to fudgy chocolates, loaf and sheet cakes and elegant layered showstoppers, this collection gathers dependable recipes for every occasion. You’ll find foolproof techniques for tender crumbs, stable frostings and quick one‑bowl bakes alongside ideas for seasonal flavors and celebration-worthy finishes.

Oatmeal-Glazed Breakfast Cake

By Food Network Kitchen

This hearty cake is packed with oats, flavored with cinnamon and topped with a warm glaze made with more oats, shredded coconut and nuts. We used pecans, but feel free to use whatever you have on hand. It's a great way to clean out the pantry and simple enough for kids to help with. Bake one on a Sunday and enjoy it all week long for breakfast or as a snack! It's delicious at room temperature or lightly warmed in the microwave.

Chocolate Mousse Cake

By Desserts

A rich, mousse-like chocolate cake baked in a 20 cm (8-inch) round pan. The edges set while the center stays soft and slightly trembling for a creamy, mousse texture once cooled. Simple one-bowl method yields an elegant dessert in under an hour.

45 min

Easy Apple Cake

By Casey Elsass

This buttery apple cake is pure fall comfort. Spiced with cinnamon, it has a bright kick from apple cider vinegar and a crunchy brown-sugar-and-walnut topping.

Ultimate Chocolate Cake

By null

I’ve been making cakes and pies in the Food52 offices since 2014, and couldn’t be happier that they asked me to develop a new cake to celebrate their 10th birthday. This cake is chocolate, plus chocolate, with a little chocolate (I don’t use the word ultimate lightly). It’s impressive to look at it - but more importantly, it’s so, so delicious, just like these last 10 years have been.

Maialino's Olive Oil Cake

By null

Olive oil cake at its best has a crackling crust and an aromatic oil-rich middle, which, if it held any more moisture, would be pudding. Pulling this off should be easy—there aren't even egg whites to whip and fold, or butter to cream—but it isn't always. This one, however, is perfect, and will ruin you for all others. Recipe from Maialino Restaurant in New York City, where they also serve it at breakfast in muffin form, and they've been known to turn it into a birthday cake, layered with mascarpone buttercream. The recipe is pictured here with Michelle Polzine's Slow-Roasted Strawberries from Genius Desserts by Kristen Miglore (Ten Speed Press, September 2018). Helpful tools for this recipe: Olipac Stainless Steel Olive Oil Dispenser GIR Silicone Grip Whisk Mosser Glass Cake Stand —Genius Recipes

Persimmon Cardamom Cake

By Eric Kim

This bouncy, tender spiced cake celebrates winter persimmons in all their glory. Baking wedged Fuyu persimmons — the squat, tomatolike ones — until their flavor concentrates and their moisture dissipates leaves you with syrupy fruit that doesn’t sog up the cake later. A little coconut extract, a whisper of the tropical, props up the gentle sweet aroma of the orange fruit, with cardamom playing a major role in bringing out its floral, pumpkiny qualities. Whipped cream folded into the batter at the end, a trick from the baker Heather Dekker-Hurlbert, results in a light, even crumb. Thanks to a sprinkling of cardamon sugar on top before baking, the cake gains a glorious caramelized crust with cinnamon toast vibes (but cardamom).

1 hr 45 min

Beet Chocolate Cake

By Anna Stockwell

Earthy-sweet beet purée gives this gluten-free chocolate cake a red velvet hue but also lends so much buttery moistness that you'd never guess the cake is dairy-free as well.

Pecan Cake

By June Kim

This tender butter pecan cake channels all the gooey richness of pecan pie, with toasted nuts and a sticky bourbon caramel glaze.

Easy Carrot Cake With Cream Cheese Frosting

By Genevieve Ko

The whole point of carrot cake is that, in its most ideal form, it’s a vehicle for cream cheese frosting, a triple stack of fluffy spiced cake, finished with generous swoops of frosting. Baking the cake batter in a half-sheet pan, then cutting the flat cake into three rectangles delivers thin, even layers and skips the hassle of baking and slicing tall cake rounds. To highlight the tang of cream cheese, this frosting includes sour cream instead of butter. It gives the whole thing a fresh lightness, each forkful equal parts tender cake and silky frosting. The resulting cake looks modern with its sharp angles but can still be cut into classic triangular wedges.

2 hr 20 min

Vanilla Cake With Cookie Butter Frosting

By Yossy Arefi

Spiced speculoos cookie butter is delicious straight from the jar, and in this cake it makes the perfect addition to a quick and easy buttercream frosting. The plush dark brown sugar and vanilla cake is just as easy to make and is extra moist thanks to a generous amount of sour cream. This cake keeps well on the counter for a few days, loosely covered, although it’s so snackable you shouldn’t be surprised if it doesn’t last that long.

55 min

Cinnamon Roll Bundt Cake With Cream Cheese Frosting

By Genevieve Ko

There’s only one problem with cinnamon rolls: They taste best fresh out of the oven with runny icing. This Bundt cake is also delicious warm, but gets only better as it sits, so you can get a hit of cinnamon roll goodness for days. Including panko in the spiced brown sugar swirl allows the cake layers to pull apart the way yeasted rolls do. The simple vanilla pound cake batter is tender and tangy with cream cheese. More cream cheese — a lot more — cloaks the cake in the form of frosting. Just as there’s no end to holiday cheer, there’s no limit on cream cheese frosting.

3 hr

Korean Fresh Cream Cake

By null

Helpful tools for this recipe: Glass-Bottom Springform Pan Food52 x Rosti Ultimate Melamine Mixing Bowl Nordic Ware Copper-Plated Cooling Grids (Set of 2)

Pistachio Bundt Cake

By Shilpa Uskokovic

An easy but impressive cake fit for many an occasion. Rich and tender, with an arresting green interior. Topped with a lemony cream cheese glaze.

Orange-Cardamom Olive Oil Cake

By null

I’ve made this cake more than five times in a single week while testing this recipe and I did not get tired of it, which happens very rarely in the process of developing a recipe. Initially, there were no oranges involved—this was supposed to be a simple cardamom olive oil cake—but I’ve had a bunch of oranges to on hand so I decided to incorporate them in this scenario. For personal reasons, I am usually quite hesitant about eating orange peels: It reminds me of this panettone I used to eat as a child, that always had a bunch of orange peel chunks in there. They were never candied or anything, just little squares of bitter orange peel thrown in the dough that took the joy of eating a panettone away from me. With that said, I decided to give the orange peels another chance with a quick test and I’m so happy I did. I candied some thinly sliced oranges in a cardamom sugar syrup and placed them a the bottom of the baking pan, poured the cake batter on top, and baked them together. The orange taste worked so well with the olive oil and cardamom in there I had to keep it. I like to serve this cake with a tiny drizzle of olive oil on top and some tangy yogurt on the side. Helpful tools for this recipe: Farmhouse Measuring Spoons GIR Silicone Basting Brush GIR Silicone Spatula

Chocolate Truffle Cakes

By The New York Times

Ethereally light with molten centers, these just-for-one chocolate truffle cakes from Wolfgang Puck feel fancy but are quite easy to make. They’re a streamlined version of the cakes his chefs make for the Governors Ball following the Academy Awards. Mr. Puck advises pulling the cakes from the oven while the centers are still soft, as “you want it to be a little underdone so the inside is creamy.” He serves them with berries and whipped cream that’s sometimes mixed with crème fraîche but never sugar, so the cream balances out the sweet chocolate cake. You can prepare the batter in advance and simply bake the cakes right before serving, as Mr. Puck does when catering. He notes that “everybody saves room for dessert.” You can watch Wolfgang Puck make a version of this recipe here.

30 min

Very Easy Apple Cake

By null

This apple cake is as light, puffy, and fluffy as it is easy, easy, and easy. It comes together with only four ingredients (not counting salt, an honorary Big Little ingredient) and takes 20-something minutes to get in the oven. Did I mention there’s no butter or oil? There’s no butter or oil. Oh, and no commercial leavener, like baking soda or baking powder, either. The inspiration here comes by way of Russia, where crackly, tender apple sharlotka is made with white sugar and white flour. This newfangled rendition calls in light brown sugar (malty! caramely!) and white whole wheat flour (still a whole grain, just milled from a paler variety of wheat). Both ingredients turn the cake golden in color and nutty-complex in flavor (and once you have them in your pantry, you’ll start swapping them into everything). I call for Granny Smith apples, but feel free to swap in any sweet-tart apple that holds up well when baked; Honey Crisp, Pink Lady, and Jonagold are all good options. The amount of apples may seem outlandish, but that’s the whole point—apples with some cake, not cake with some apples. I like this best served with confectioners’ sugar sprinkled on top, just before slicing, and a big dollop of crème fraîche (or whipped cream or Greek yogurt or vanilla ice cream) alongside. That said, it’s just as wonderful unadorned—and as suited for brunch as it is for dessert. Because this batter leans so heavily on eggs and sugar, it doesn’t hold up well, so make it the day you want to eat it.

Louisa's Cake

By null

Louisa is a family friend, gardener and chef from Castellina in Chianti, Italy, where we gather several times a year. She cooks everything from memory and threw this together one night last spring. When we pressed her for the recipe she hastily rattled some ingredients off and we scrambled to write it all down on a napkin. Along with my husband and children, we've tested this cake about 6 times, and friends are constantly asking for the recipe. —SML Office

Cardamom Cake From Niloufer Ichaporia King

By null

When The Guardian asked Alice Waters for the one recipe she couldn't live without, it was this simple, unforgettable cake with a crackly top and fluffed cardamom crumb from Niloufer Ichaporia King. Be warned: You may be making it for birthdays, Mother's Days, and all other snacking occasions from here on out. As King writes in her cookbook My Bombay Kitchen, “The recipe for this cake, one of the most precious gifts I’ve ever received in my life, comes from a generous Swedish friend, Ragnhild Langlet, a textile artist of extraordinary talent. The cake became an immediate favorite in our household, an honorary Parsi dessert and our most requested birthday cake. “We met Ragnhild Langlet in a Berkeley garden in the early summer of 1987 at a potluck wedding celebration to which she brought an unassuming cake baked in an unassuming pan. That unassuming little cake was one of the most powerful things I’ve ever tasted. It was suffused with the scent of cardamom, crunchy whole seeds throughout, sweet enough, rich enough, light enough. Cake perfection. This cake is excellent the first day, even better the next and the next and the next, if it lasts that long. Serve with fruit or a custard or ice cream. There’s nothing that it doesn’t complement.” A few more tips: Cardamom seeds are increasingly easy to buy already freed from their papery green pods. But if you can only find the whole pods, it’s easy enough to crack them open in a mortar or on a cutting board with the side of a chef’s knife or underside of a skillet, then shake out the seeds. If you don’t have a mortar and pestle, you can bruise the seeds on a cutting board in the same ways. Rose Geranium Cardamom Cake variation: For Niloufer’s friend Catherine’s birthday in 1987, she embedded rose geranium leaves in the top of the cake (actually the bottom of the springform pan) along with the almonds, and served it with a winter fruit compote also lightly scented with rose geranium. If you can get near a cardamom plant, which is a member of the ginger family, try a leaf from it, too. Recipe adapted very slightly from My Bombay Kitchen: Traditional and Modern Parsi Home Cooking (University of California Press, June 2007). Helpful tools for this recipe: Glass-Bottom Springform Pan Food52 x Rosti Ultimate Melamine Mixing Bowl Nordic Ware Copper-Plated Cooling Grids (Set of 2)

White Chocolate–Cranberry Cake

By Shilpa Uskokovic

With tender buttermilk cake layers, a cranberry jam so good you’ll want it on toast, and a silky white chocolate frosting, this is a cake that’s equal parts impressive and achievable.

Mini Chocoflan

By Ryan Gantala

A rich two-layer chocoflan: a silky caramel custard (flan) beneath a moist chocolate cake. This doubled recipe fills about twelve mini pans or one 9x13-inch pan — chill overnight for best texture and an impressive caramel drizzle when inverted.

5 hr 30 min

Copycat Olive Garden Black Tie Mousse Cake

By Anya Ptacek

This decadent four layer dessert features a rich chocolate cake, silky layers of dark chocolate cheesecake and vanilla mousse, and decadent ganache.

1 hr 30 min

Flourless Chocolate Cake

By Genevieve Yam

Rich and pleasantly bittersweet with crisp edges and a fudgy interior, this flourless chocolate cake will keep you coming back for more.

3 hr

Caramelized Banana Upside-Down Cake

By null

An easy to throw together, deliciously moist (a controversial word, I know), oil-based yellow cake—baked in a cast iron skillet and "topped" with caramelized bananas.

Olive Oil Pumpkin Cake With Salted Maple Cream

By Andy Baraghani

If pumpkin pie feels tired, this cake is the upgrade: It’s plush and deeply spiced without veering into heaviness, the kind of dessert that feels just as welcome at a holiday table as it does on a random Tuesday night. The salted maple whipped cream is what makes it sing, adding a cool, fluffy richness to balance the spice. (Sneak some bites but please, do your best to get as much of it onto the cake as possible.) Like most oil-based cakes, this pumpkin cake actually improves with time, so don’t hesitate to bake it a day ahead; the flavors settle in and the crumb gets even more tender.

1 hr 30 min

Flourless Chocolate Cake

By The Gourmet Test Kitchen

This flourless chocolate cake is rich and densely chocolaty. It's just the kind of low-effort, high-reward recipe we love. Top with whipped cream or berries.

Ube Cake Rolls

By FEATR

Soft, nostalgic Filipino-style sponge cake rolled with a creamy ube-halaya and cream cheese filling. Light, fluffy cake and a rich, purple filling make this a showstopping dessert for celebrations or afternoon snacks.

1 hr 50 min

Karithopita (Greek Walnut and Olive Oil Cake with Orange Syrup)

By Kate Winslow

This Greek walnut and olive oil cake—spiced with cinnamon, cloves and orange zest—is delicious on its own, but really sings with a drizzle of sweet orange syrup.

2 hr

Double Chocolate Fondant Cake

By Desserts

Rich, gooey and deeply chocolatey, this fondant cake sits between a brownie and a lava cake. Quick to make and impressive to serve — particularly delicious with a cold scoop of ice cream.

1 hr 15 min

Hot Chocolate Cake

By Felipe D. Koiffman

A deeply chocolate, syrup-soaked cake with a glossy chocolate cream topping — ultra moist and intensely chocolatey. The cake is baked, pierced, soaked with a hot milk-chocolate syrup, then finished with a simple chocolate-cream ganache.

1 hr

Perfectly Spiced Pumpkin Cake

By Dawn Perry

This easy pumpkin cake recipe delivers tender crumb, rich fall flavor, and a tangy cream cheese frosting—no mixer required.