Cake

Incredibly moist banana cake with chocolate glaze.

Chocolate Glazed Banana Bundt Cake Recipe

Incredibly moist banana bundt cake recipe with a sneakily easy chocolate glaze.

Incredibly moist banana cake with chocolate glaze.

You know what I’d rather do than watch my husband try to do homework with my first grader? (because o.m.g. it’s like having TWO first graders who won’t stop arguing with each other)

So, yeah. Pretty much anything else would be good.

But this banana bundt cake recipe — and licking that big puddle of chocolate glaze off the plate — would be pretty high up on my list.

Incredibly moist banana cake with a sneakily easy chocolate glaze.

Two things really surprised me about this recipe. And not because one or the other, but because both things are going on here.

One. This cake is supremely soft and moist. Like, crumbs-that-stick-to-your-fork moist. Which I’d typically expect from a banana cake. Except for–

Two. It baked into a fabulously sturdy bundt cake. In my experience, bundt cakes that hold up really well aren’t always high up on the soft, fluffy, and moist scale. Maybe they’re moist. But never quite as tender and fluffy as this cake is on the inside.

🍌🍌🍌 CELEBRATE BANANAS with us: our favorite Banana Bread Recipes 🍌🍌🍌

Basically, this is the superhero of bundt cakes. And banana cakes. It’s the superhero of all cakes.

Incredibly moist banana cake with a sneakily easy chocolate glaze.

And that Banana Bundt Cake recipe glaze…

Also, that chocolate glaze. ????????

And want to hear my dirty little secret about that? It’s store bought frosting. YES. IT. IS.

Listen. I have really solid, fool proof, fantabulous chocolate ganache recipe right here that would work perfectly for this cake. And if you want to go the all homemade route, please! Be my guest!

But if you’re running short on time (who isn’t?), melting down about half of a can of Pillsbury Milk Chocolate frosting to pour over this cake is an excellent option. It tastes delicious, and it pours beautifully. Plus, it takes about 30 seconds and is virtually mess-free. You won’t be sad if that’s the way you go, I promise.

Incredibly moist banana cake with a sneakily easy chocolate glaze.

No matter how you slice it, it’s always better than watching my husband attempt homework with a first grader. ????

Yellow Birthday Cake with Creamy Chocolate Frosting Recipe

This is the perfect birthday cake recipe! Buttery golden yellow cake with creamy, fudgy chocolate frosting. And lots of sprinkles, of course!

This is the perfect birthday cake recipe! Buttery golden yellow cake with creamy, fudgy chocolate frosting.

I’ve mentioned before that I don’t do birthday cakes.

I don’t make my husband’s birthday cakes. I don’t make my kids’ birthday cakes. And I don’t make my own birthday cakes. It’s a very firm personal policy that I established a few years back.

Why? It’s just too much unnecessary stress. And I can’t emphasize the unnecessary part enough. I mean, between planning a party, buy and wrapping gifts, and setting up the whole DAY in general, whyyyyyyyyyyy go through the ordeal of making a cake too? After enough birthdays of ending up grouchy and tired in a sticky, messy kitchen, I decided to abandon the practice of birthday cake-making altogether. I’d rather spend the day in celebration and eat a delicious cake from one of my favorite bakeries.

If you ask me, there’s absolutely no shame in that (especially when I’m baking cakes nearly every other day of the year!).

But, back when I used to make birthday cakes for myself, this is what I would make. A perfect, simple yellow cake with glorious fudgy frosting and a ridiculous amount of sprinkles! It’s everything that a birthday cake should be!

This is the perfect birthday cake recipe! Buttery golden yellow cake with creamy, fudgy chocolate frosting.

When I was in college, we’d make this cake on each roommate’s birthday. But we used a box cake and store-bought frosting and pink crystal sprinkles.

This is my grown up version of that.

Moist and tender, butter yellow cake made extra soft by using whole milk and incorporating sour cream into the batter (is there anything not made better by sour cream??). It’s thick and puffy, and crazy delicious.

The coup de gras of this cake, however, is the chocolate frosting on top. I took my favorite chocolate fudge frosting and made one teensy-weensy, but oh-so-significant alteration… I omitted 3/4 cups of the powdered sugar from the recipe.

What does that mean?

It means that we’re taking out just enough powdered sugar to make this frosting extra creamy by increasing the ratio of fat to dry ingredients. You wouldn’t want to frost a free-standing cake with this frosting, because it wouldn’t firm up well enough to stay where you put it. But if you’re frosting a sheet cake? That’s a different story! It’s the perfect vessel for all that creamy, indulgent goodness.

This is the perfect birthday cake recipe! Buttery golden yellow cake with creamy, fudgy chocolate frosting.

This rich, indulgent, fudgy frosting is the perfect compliment to that buttery yellow cake underneath. The only thing that could make it any better?

SPRINKLES. And lots of them. So don’t forget to add plenty of those!

And hey– Happy Birthday 🙂

Single Serve Chocolate Molten Lava Mug Cakes made in a minute in the microwave

Peanut Butter Chocolate Lava Mug Cake Recipe

This single serve recipe is perfect for when you need a little chocolate fix but don’t want to make an entire cake!

Single Serve Chocolate Molten Lava Mug Cakes made in a minute in the microwave

WARNING: this is where diets come to die… in a rich, fudgy pool of decadent melty chocolate and peanut butter enveloped in a thick, fluffy cake.

I’m just saying.

Single Serve Chocolate Molten Lava Mug Cakes made in a minute in the microwave

Sometimes you just need chocolate cake rightnowrightnow. Right?

And when that craving strikes, you don’t want spend the time (and dirty dishes) slaving away over a full sized cake. And you really don’t want an entire cake sitting around, tempting you for days after the craving has passed (because, omg, I can eat an entire chocolate cake in one afternoon without even really wanting to– please tell me that’s not just me?!).

Enter: mug cakes. They are simple and easy, warm and fresh, and they’re ready RIGHT NOW.

It’s brilliant.

Single Serve Chocolate Molten Lava Mug Cakes made in a minute in the microwave

These little cakes are a little different from typical molten lava cakes. Because instead of slightly underbaking the cakes to create the lava center, I’m actually adding a brick of chocolate and a teaspoon of creamy peanut butter (!!!!!) to get all warm and melty in the center of this cake.

I prefer this method over the underbaking for a couple of reasons.

One, for some reason the uncooked cake batter “lava” has always kind of weirded me out. I don’t know why– it’s not like I don’t lick the bowl after I make a cake! But something about uncooked batter masquerading as melted chocolate… it just never seemed right to me. So there’s that.

Second of all… since we are microwaving these cakes rather than baking them, the heating method is kind of wonky. We’re dealing with cooking time in terms of seconds rather than minutes, so it’s nearly impossible to be as precise as we would need to be in underbaking the cake the exactly right amount of time. By using actual chocolate in the center, we eliminate the headache of trying to figure out how to keep the center unbaked while nuking the rest of the cake just enough. Fabulous.

Single Serve Chocolate Molten Lava Mug Cakes made in a minute in the microwave

I desperately wish that I had some ice cream on hand when I was photographing this. Wouldn’t a big scoop of vanilla plopped in this warm mug of melted chocolate and peanut butter just be divine?

All I had at the time was whipped cream, and that was pretty good too 🙂

Just a few simple ingredients and about 60 seconds is all you have standing between you and this cake. Enjoy!!

Chocolate Wasted Cake

Chocolate Wasted Cake Recipe

This cake is not for the faint of heart! Sinfully fudgy and moist on the inside and recklessly covered in chocolate on the outside, topped with Snickers candy bars, Reese’s Cups, sea salt caramel filled chocolates, dark chocolate ganache, and a semisweet chocolate drizzle. 
Chocolate Wasted Cake

This cake is not subtle. No siree. It slaps you in the face with more chocolate than you ever knew could be in one cake, from the inside out!

You can’t see it yet, but the inside of the cake is actually the best part. I’m putting the cart before the horse there though. I think before we get to that, we’d better talk about the outside first. I mean, how could we not??

Just look at this monstrosity!! Snickers candy bars, Reese’s cups, sea salt caramel filled chocolates, dark chocolate ganache and a semisweet drizzle are all piled high on top with my favorite Guittard milk chocolate chips covering the rest of the cake.

I mean… there just are no words for this level of chocolate-iness.

Let’s talk method for a minute: it may look like one big mess just thrown together, but it actually does require a certain level of technique to get things to stay put. Those chocolate chips on the side are tricky little boogers. Here’s what worked for me:

  • add a little more powdered sugar to the remaining frosting after you’ve layered frosting in the middle of the cake. I’ll discuss this more in a second, but the filling frosting is meant to be a little soft, so it doesn’t hold the chocolate chips as well on the outside.
  • pile the chocolate chips up the side of the cake and press in– I used plastic gloves, so that I didn’t get chocolate all over my hands. This part is a bit messy.
  • this step is hard to describe, and it’s not 100% necessary, but I felt like it was helpful– fold parchment paper into a long strip about the same height as the cake. Wrap the strip around like cake like a tube, and gently tie a piece of bakers string around it to hold it in place. This allows you to do a little more pressing through the parchment paper without making a mess, and it secures all the chocolate chips onto the cake while the frosting does a little bit of hardening (not like hard hard, but just the little bit that powdered sugar causes in frosting). Keep the parchment on there until ready to serve.

Chocolate Wasted Cake

Ok, so let’s talk about the inside of this cake! SO GOOD!

It’s my very favorite chocolate cake recipe that starts with a cake mix and is made incredibly moist by adding pudding and sour cream. Add to that my very favorite fudgy chocolate frosting, which I’ve thinned ever so slightly by adding a little less powdered sugar than the recipe calls for. This really contributes to a further moistening of the cake, so that it literally just melts in your mouth.

As good as the outside of the cake it (and how it could it not be?!), the inside is really my favorite part of this whole thing. It’s really pretty incredible, and I think you are going to just die over it.

I mean, just look at this!

Chocolate Wasted Cake

By the way… you can use any chocolate candy you would like on the top. I personally think M&Ms and Oreos would be amazing. But I have to say, I die over the ooey, gooey caramel that I used on this cake. I used Ghirardelli sea salt caramel filled chocolate, and I thought the caramel was the perfect thing to break up the chocolate a little bit. And it’s just visually so great as well.

This cake definitely takes a little bit of time and effort, but it’s so worth it! Enjoy 🙂

Want to comment on this cake? Visit me on Instagram and let me know what you think!

Snickerdoodle Gooey Cake Bars

Snickerdoodle Gooey Cake Recipe

If you love snickerdoodles, then you will love these gooey cake bars! Even better? All you’ll need is one bowl to make them.
Snickerdoodle Gooey Cake Bars

Gooey cake bars are seriously life changing. Have you made them before? It’s like a layer of cheesecake sitting on top of a dense cookie-like cake bar.

These bars combine the cinnamon sugar of a snickerdoodle with the grand yumminess that is a gooey cake bar– it’s genius! Annnnnnnnnnd it’s another dairy-filled recipe that I accidentally face planted into. I know. #nursingmomprobs

Snickerdoodle Gooey Cake Bars

I could make these bars over and over again. They taste amazing, and they are SO easy to make (even though they look super fancy and labor intensive, they’re really not). All you’ll need is your one stand mixer bowl, and you can make both the cake layer and they gooey layer in that same bowl with no need to wash in between! Yay for less dish-washing! Can I get an AMEN?!

I hate dishes. Like, hate hate dishes.

But back to the point: these bars.

So good. Make them. Love them. The end.

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Actually, not quite “the end.” What I really should have said was: make them. Love them. Buy this cookbook!

This Snickerdoodle Gooey Cake Bar recipe comes from this amazing cookbook written by my sweet friend, Jocelyn, who blogs over at Grandbaby Cakes. It is a beautiful, beautiful book written by an obviously beautiful and food-loving soul. It’s brimming with gorgeous and mouth watering cakes, like these…

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It’s also full of sweet family photos that I just couldn’t get enough of. Like this precious one…

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And my favorite page of the whole book?

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Just inside the front cover. Isn’t that the sweetest thing you’ve ever seen in a cookbook? A place to write the first generation to own this book! Jocelyn’s book is full of love and great recipes, and I loved it cover to cover.

So until you get your hands on Grandbaby Cakes, the cookbook (as you must!)– here’s a recipe to tide you over 🙂

❤️