Snack Cakes—for When You Want Cake but with Less Effort

Snack cakes are typically made with pantry staples, though you can also find them with fresh ingredients, such as fruit, mixed in. They can be frosted or not; most taste fine with just a simple dusting of confectioners’ sugar, but they can also be spruced up if desired.

Over the years, we have made a lot of snack cakes in the Cook’s Country kitchen. Here is a sampling of our favorites.

Our Applesauce Spice Cake with Brown Sugar Icing leans on applesauce to add sweetness, moisture, and structure. (A jar from the pantry works fine, but if you’ve just gone apple picking, you can make your own.) Thinking about what pairs well with apples, we enhanced the cake with caramelly brown sugar, floral vanilla, and warm spices reminiscent of autumn (ginger, nutmeg, cloves, and cinnamon). And to give the cake some easy elegance and reinforce the caramel notes, we whipped up a quick brown sugar icing. Sprinkling some toasted pecans on top added crunch.

When you have ripe, speckled bananas hanging around, our Banana–Chocolate Chip Snack Cake is the thing to make. Our banana snack cake is fluffy rather than dense like banana bread (also a delicious use for ripe bananas) because we beat softened butter with sugar to incorporate air into the batter. Some chocolate chips add sweet pockets throughout the cake, and an optional cream cheese frosting contributes a little tang while still keeping the cake simple.

Carrot cakes can be a lot of work, so we skipped the fussy stacking of layers and moved our Carrot Snack Cake to a 13 by 9-inch baking pan. We shredded carrots in the food processor and reused the appliance later to whip cream cheese, sugar, butter, and vanilla into a frosting. Plumping golden raisins in orange juice introduced sweet pops to our cake. Adding pumpkin pie spice, a convenient pantry item, with the dry ingredients was a shortcut to getting well-rounded spice flavor in the cake. And soaking the cake (while still hot) in buttermilk syrup moistened it and added some tang that complemented the frosting and balanced the sweetness in the cake. 

Our Coconut Snack Cake is a streamlined version of a coconut layer cake. It’s a simple stir-together cake packed with coconut in three forms: sweetened shredded coconut, cream of coconut, and coconut extract. The sweetened shredded coconut adds texture to the cake, while the cream of coconut adds sweetness. And the coconut extract drives home the coconut flavor without overwhelming the cake. We spike the cream cheese frosting with a touch more coconut extract and sprinkle some toasted shredded coconut on top. If you love coconut, this is the snack cake you’ll be grabbing pieces of all day long.

Our Gingerbread Snack Cake, developed by Ronni Lundy, takes inspiration from Appalachia, where gingerbread is a beloved, time-honored tradition. Beyond the usual ginger and cinnamon, the tender cake gets its bold flavor from a host of other flavor powerhouses: bitter orange marmalade, unsweetened cocoa powder, brewed coffee, and black pepper. Sorghum syrup, an ingredient oft-used in Appalachian recipes, adds sweetness, plus a buttery note that maple syrup lacks. The cake is just perfect for eating right out of the pan. You can dust it with confectioners’ sugar if you like.

If you are on top of your game, you have a jar of our Preserved Peaches in Syrup in your pantry, and you’re looking for ways to use it. Our Preserved Peach Snack Cake is a rich, milky cake (it has both condensed milk and whole milk) that’s the ideal vehicle for serving up those sweet, syrupy peaches. Simply whisk together the batter, spread it into an 8-inch square baking pan, sprinkle sugar over the batter, and arrange the peach slices on top. After 45 minutes of baking and 10 minutes of cooling, the warm cake is ready for eating—on its own or with a dollop of whipped cream. (If you don’t have our preserved peaches on hand, you can purchase some to use in this cake.)

Our Pumpkin–Chocolate Chip Snack Cake uses the quick bread method, which just means we stirred together all the dry ingredients and then all the wet ingredients separately before combining the two. This is a failproof way to ensure that the cake is not overmixed (which would make it less tender). Using pumpkin pie spice meant we could just hit up our spice cabinet for one jar rather than multiple jars to get that flavor everyone associates with pumpkin desserts. Mini chocolate chips add an element of fun. Put this cake out after school, and it’s bound to disappear quickly.

With so many fun options to choose from, which snack cake will you make the next time a cake craving strikes?