13 Ways To Upgrade Homemade Yellow Cake

Yellow cake is a classic. It's a basic vanilla cake that gets its yellow hue from oil and whole eggs. While sometimes you just want the simplicity of a great homemade yellow cake, other times you'd prefer to take things to the next level. Luckily, it's simple to upgrade this iconic bake. There are all kinds of ways you can improve upon it and extra ingredients you can add to boost its flavor.

As a food writer with some professional baking experience, I've made numerous yellow cakes in my time. Sometimes I make them as simple as possible, topping them with nothing but chocolate or vanilla icing. Other times I look for ways to make them new and exciting. You can stick to the same basic recipe but never make the same cake twice with clever tweaks and additions. Now's your chance to get out of a cake rut and try something new and delicious. These 13 ways to upgrade homemade yellow cake will help you expand your horizon.

One super simple upgrade for yellow cake is adding chocolate chips. We all know that the combination of vanilla and chocolate works beautifully together — just look at chocolate chip cookies — so it's an obvious choice. What's more, the addition of chocolate chips goes well with both of the most common frosting options for this cake: vanilla and chocolate.

It's beyond easy to pull this off. Just make your batter as usual and then fold in between 3 ½ and 7 ounces of chocolate chips, depending on how prominent you want them to be. You can use any kind of chocolate you like: dark, milk, white, or blonde. Dark chocolate is the grownup choice, giving you bittersweet notes. Milk chocolate is richer and creamier, while white chocolate leans further into the vanilla vibes. Blonde chocolate has notes of caramel that add to the complexity of the finished cake. All of them are different, but each is a great option.

The beauty of using chocolate chips is that it also adds texture to the cake, something that's often missing. If you want it to be even chunkier, try breaking up bars of chocolate rather than using chips. Bar chocolate is often of higher quality, too. You might wonder why you'd do this instead of just making a chocolate cake but it's quite different. Rather than being one-note chocolate, you get a juxtaposition between the vanilla cake and the chocolate pieces.

Most of us have had confetti cake at some point in our lives — even if you haven't come across one since your 10th birthday party. Rainbow-colored with a bit of crunchy texture, it livens up any cake mix. And all you need to do to turn yellow cake into a confetti cake is to add sprinkles into the batter.

To transform an average quantity of yellow cake batter (enough to make two to three layers) into confetti cake, add around ½ to ¾ of a cup of sprinkles to your batter and stir well to evenly distribute them. Sprinkles are sweet, so you may find you want to reduce the amount of sugar in the cake slightly to balance it out — just by a few tablespoons.

The most common way to frost a confetti cake is with vanilla frosting, decorated with yet more sprinkles. However, if you like the contrast of chocolate frosting, it also works well here. Again, you can decorate it with sprinkles to finish off the effect and hint at what's inside.

Want to upgrade your yellow cake? You need to learn more about reverse creaming. It's a simple baking technique that can level-up your sponge. The reverse creaming method will change the way you make yellow cake. It's a technique that creates a tender cake with a fine crumb — and what more could you want?

The traditional creaming method that's usually used for yellow cake is where you beat butter and sugar together as the first step. The reverse creaming method, on the other hand, begins by mixing the dry ingredients with the butter. This way, the flour becomes coated with fat, which slows down gluten formation when you later add the liquids. Less gluten means a softer, more delicate cake texture.

If you want to try it, first mix the dry ingredients like flour, sugar, and baking powder. Then, add room-temperature butter and mix until it reaches a sandy texture. After that, you'll add the wet ingredients, usually in two parts — first some liquid to moisten everything, then the rest to achieve a smooth batter.

This method changes the cake's texture. Because the flour is coated in fat, you get a finer crumb. This means the tiny bubbles in the cake are smaller and more even. The cake is less likely to be dense or tough — usually, it's melt-in-the-mouth soft and moist.

Yellow cake is all about the vanilla. As the dominant flavor, the type you use can make all the difference. That's why using real vanilla beans instead of vanilla extract is a fantastic way to elevate a classic yellow cake. Vanilla beans have a more complex flavor than extract. Using it gives cake a richer vanilla flavor that's delicate and almost floral. Each bean contains hundreds of tiny seeds, and when you add them to the batter or frosting, you'll see little black specks that show off the real vanilla.

To use a vanilla bean, start by slicing it lengthwise with a sharp knife. Then, scrape the seeds out with the back of the blade. You can add the seeds directly to the cake batter or mix them into the frosting. Adding them to the sponge makes the flavor infuse throughout the cake. If you add them to the frosting, you'll level it up, taking it from basic to the kind of thing you'd find in a fancy patisserie. Since the vanilla flavor will cook off slightly in the oven, you might find that using vanilla beans in the frosting gives you a more obvious vanilla bean taste.

While vanilla extract is quick, convenient, and cheaper, real vanilla beans make homemade cakes special. Vanilla bean paste is the next best thing if you don't want to mess around with vanilla pods. But we'd recommend trying it at least once.

Fruit can transform a yellow cake, bringing a range of flavors, depending on what you decide to use. However, not everyone can be bothered to prepare the fruit. In some cases you need to peel it, chop it, and stew it before adding it to your cake mixture. However, there's a simpler way to make a fruity version of yellow cake: use apple pie filling.

This three-ingredient apple cake uses a boxed yellow cake mix combined with apple pie filling and eggs. However, you can absolutely use apple pie filling to doctor a homemade yellow cake batter. The hard part is adjusting the liquid in the cake because the canned apple pie filling introduced more moisture. I'd recommend using around half the normal amount of milk in the recipe and adjusting from there. If you know the usual consistency of the batter, you can adjust it on the fly until it's right.

Apple pie filling usually contains cinnamon along with apples and sugar, which brings some pleasant warmth to the mixture. Personally, I'd add extra cinnamon but your mileage may vary. You can serve it straight up or finish it off with a streusel topping. It's great with cream or ice cream.

Lemon cake is one of my favorites, and I often make it by adding lemon juice and zest to my go-to yellow cake recipe. However, you don't have to stop with lemon — you can do this with any citrus fruit of your choosing. Orange and lime are the most obvious other options. But grapefruit also works, as do lesser-used citrus fruits like yuzu or bergamot, assuming you can get your hands on them. You can even use a combination of various citrus fruits.

You only need a couple of tablespoons of juice and zest to turn a yellow cake into a citrus cake, although you can adjust this, using more juice if you want a sharper citrus tang. Citrus curd is the perfect filling for a citrus layer cake — whether lemon, lime, orange, or other. Sweet yet sharp, curd elevates the whole thing. You might also want to frost the exterior, perhaps with a citrus buttercream or cream cheese frosting. My favorite option is Swiss meringue buttercream, with its light, pillowy texture. You can also add other fruits to the batter. For instance, orange and blueberry is a great combo.

It's possible to turn yellow cake into a kind of cookie bar. At least, according to cookbook author and cooking show host Molly Yeh. Mashed reported that Yeh took yellow cake to the next level on Instagram – and her followers were suitably impressed with the results.

The post showed what looked like a thin, dense yellow cake, which may have had the texture of a cookie bar. It was topped with a thick layer of chocolate frosting. Yeh implied that she was experimenting with the recipe and might put sour cream or cream cheese in the frosting to make it tangy.

While Yeh doesn't seem to have released this recipe, it's unclear whether it ever made it past development or if it's going to be in an upcoming cookbook. Either way, it would be absolutely possible to make a similar recipe yourself. Either adapt your chosen yellow cake recipe to make it denser with less of a rise or find a vanilla cookie bar recipe, then frost it with a generous layer of chocolate icing and you're onto a winner.

Turning a yellow cake into a trifle is a great way to upgrade it. Classic trifle consists of layers of fruit, jam, custard, cake (or sponge fingers), and whipped cream. What's cool is that you can use your favorite yellow cake recipe as the sponge. It's also a perfect way to use up leftover cake or repurpose a cake that didn't turn out quite as expected.

To make a trifle, start by baking your yellow cake and letting it cool. Then, cut it into cubes, which makes it easy to layer. Some recipes call for soaking the cake in sherry or liqueur, but it's up to you. If you don't, the juices from the fruit, the jam, and the custard will all soak into the sponge, anyway, which is also quite tasty.

Next, layer the cake cubes in a large glass bowl, alternating with layers of fruit and jam, custard, and whipped cream. Try combinations like strawberries and vanilla custard, or mix it up with tropical fruits and coconut cream. Although sponge fingers are often used in trifle, homemade cake actually takes it up a notch. It's tastier than sponge fingers and isn't as dry, which is great if you aren't making your dessert far enough ahead of time for all the juices to soak into the sponge.

Adding cookie butter — such as the famous Trader Joe's version or Lotus Biscoff spread — to yellow cake is an easy way to make it taste even better. Made from crushed speculaas cookies, this spread brings warm spices and caramel-like notes that taste amazing with the classic flavor of yellow cake.

There's a four-ingredient cookie butter cake recipe that uses boxed yellow cake. But you can also pull this off with homemade cake. All you need to do is add around half a cup of cookie butter to the batter when you're mixing it. Really, it's that simple. It adds some extra fat to the recipe, but it won't affect the bake, so you shouldn't need to make other adjustments.

If you love speculaas, you can take things a step further by frosting your cake with a cookie butter buttercream. To make this, simply beat softened butter with powdered sugar and a generous scoop of cookie butter until you get a smooth, spreadable frosting. Finally, you can finish the cake off with Lotus Biscoff or other speculaas cookies. The crumbs also make a great decoration.

It only takes one switch to greatly change the flavor profile of your yellow cake. Switch the butter in the recipe for extra-virgin olive oil and you no longer have a basic vanilla cake. Instead, you have one with the rich, fruity, peppery notes of olive oil. This kind of cake isn't for everyone, but we think they're worth trying. They're great if you don't want something too sweet and over the top, as they're usually served with a sprinkling of powdered sugar and some fresh fruit — no sugary frosting in sight.

Although there are plenty of dedicated olive oil cakes out there, it's also easy to adapt an existing yellow cake recipe. You just need to switch the butter for olive oil, but it isn't exactly that simple. You shouldn't substitute butter one-for-one with olive oil. This is because oil is pure fat, whereas butter has a water content and contains ingredients other than fat. You should use three parts olive oil to four parts butter. This is the same as using ¾ of the amount of olive oil as you would butter. So, if a recipe called for 4 ounces of butter, you'd use 3 ounces of olive oil. Aside from that, you can keep the recipe the same.

The sock-it-to-me-cake is a Southern classic. It was developed by Duncan Hines and printed on box cake mixes. Therefore, it's usually made and associated with cake mixes. However, you can absolutely make it with a homemade yellow cake batter — in fact, you'll get way tastier results.

If you're not aware of this cake, it's basically a regular yellow cake batter but it's filled with a pecan streusel. It's usually baked in a bundt pan, although you could make it as a loaf cake or a layer cake. Part of the reason it's so beloved is that it's simple to throw together yet yummier than the sum of its parts.

So, how do you make it? First, let's look at the streusel filling. This is made from chopped pecan nuts, cinnamon, nutmeg, and brown sugar. You mix these ingredients together and set them aside while you prepare your batter as usual. Once the batter is mixed, you pour half into a bundt tin, add an even layer of the streusel mixture, and then top it off with the rest of the batter. Bake it for 50 to 60 minutes and you've got an excellent cake on your hands.

Adding spices to yellow cake instantly levels it up — and it's so simple. You don't have to do anything to prepare the spices. Just mix them in with the dry ingredients and prepare your cake as usual. There are all kinds of spices already in your pantry that can seriously improve a yellow cake. Effectively, what you're making is a vanilla spice cake and we're totally here for it.

You can add various spices to your favorite cake recipe. Cinnamon is a bit of a crowd pleaser. And, you can layer it with cinnamon buttercream to make a cinnamon roll cake. However, you can go beyond this fan favorite. I'm a big fan of adding cardamom to vanilla cake, although too much can be overwhelming. A blend of cinnamon and cardamom is also great. Ginger is an obvious choice for cake — and if you switch the white sugar for dark brown sugar, you give it an even richer flavor. Of course, pumpkin spice blends work well in cakes, too.

Do you know about Maryland's state cake, the Smith Island cake? Well, if not, you're in for a treat. And you're about to discover a new way to level up your yellow cake. Smith Island cake is known for its many thin layers sandwiched with rich frosting. Traditionally, it has eight to 12 layers of yellow cake, each spread with a thin layer of chocolate frosting. The layers are stacked high, giving you an impressive cake that you'll be dying to tuck into.

You can make a Smith Island cake using a regular yellow cake batter. Start by preparing your batter as usual. You might want to double the recipe so you have enough batter. Divide the mixture into eight to 12 equal portions. Use round cake pans (around 8 or 9 inches) and bake each layer separately. Because the layers are so thin, they only need about 10 to 12 minutes in the oven. After baking, let all the layers cool completely before frosting.

To assemble the cake, spread a thin layer of chocolate frosting over the top of each layer and stack them as you go. Once you've added all the layers, cover the entire cake with more frosting. Yes, it's time-consuming but the results are delicious.