12 Bundt Cake Recipes To Satisfy Your Sweet Tooth

Bundt cakes have certainly been having a moment in recent years, perhaps spurred on by the expansion of the popular Nothing Bundt Cakes chain. While Nothing Bundt has been around since the late '90s, the cakes themselves date back to the 1950s when the first Bundt-branded ring-shaped ones were produced. For this reason, Bundt cakes manage to be both charmingly retro and contemporary at the same time. What we like best about them, however, is that you don't need to be a cake-decorating pro to make them look good. All you need is a good pan-release spray to remove the cake in one piece, then a simple sprinkling of powdered sugar or a drizzle of glaze is enough to make it as photogenic as it is flavorful.

The recipes on this list are all baked in a Bundt pan — and yes, they are all cakes, too — but within those parameters they're a fairly diverse lot. We have a decorative holiday cake, a 1970s classic, and an old favorite given a makeover in a new pan. Yes, there's even a copycat from everyone's favorite Bundt cake franchise, too. (Nothing Bundt is assured of that status by virtue of being the only one we're aware of that stakes out this hyperspecialty.)

If you're skilled in the cake decorating arts and also possessed of specialty equipment, then you may see Easter as an opportunity to show off by baking a lamb or bunny cake. The rest of us, however can achieve a sufficiently festive dessert in far simpler fashion by making this white chocolate-glazed vanilla Bundt cake and sticking a few chocolate eggs on top. Jellybeans would work, as well, and make for an even more colorful cake topper.

Recipe: Easter Bundt Cake

What makes this cake so coconutty? A combination of three different ingredients: Coconut extract and canned coconut milk go into the batter, while the entire outside of the cake is coated in desiccated coconut. As to how the coconut flakes stick on the cake, that's where the white chocolate comes in. This ingredient is used to flavor a cream cheese-based frosting. Yes, this Bundt cake does require icing, but no high-level decorating skills are necessary since the coconut layer will cover any uneven patches in the same way that November snow hides the fact that you quit mowing the lawn back in July.

Recipe: White Chocolate Coconut Bundt Cake

If you'd like to see why there's such a fuss about Nothing Bundt Cakes but you're not prepared to pay retail, we don't blame you, since even a pretty plain 10-inch cake can run you upwards of 40 bucks. A far cheaper option is to do it yourself, and we have it on pretty good authority (the developer's) that this copycat cake tastes pretty close to the cake chain's version. It's also easy to put together since it starts with boxed cake mix.

Recipe: Copycat Nothing Bundt Cake

Some people like to bake pineapple upside-down cake in a square pan, some in a round pan, and come get all cutesy and rustic by using a cast iron skillet. Here, however, we're baking it in a Bundt pan, and what do you know? It turns out just fine. It looks a bit different, though, since instead of floating on top, the pineapple, brown sugar, and cherries all sink into the cake. Still, this makes for an interesting pattern and the cake tastes just as you'd expect. As an added bonus, it's less messy than the traditional kind.

Recipe: Pineapple Upside Down Bundt Cake

The citrusy zing in this cake comes from several lemons' worth of zest stirred into the batter. The juice isn't left out either, though, since a small amount of it goes into the powdered sugar glaze. If you want the cake to taste even zestier, you can sprinkle more of the grated rind on top as a garnish, but another idea would be to decorate the cake with blueberries for a sweet and fruity contrast.

Recipe: Lemon Cake

Unlike strawberry cake made from a mix, this dessert isn't bright pink. Instead, the chopped fresh berries stirred into the batter lend some subtle stippling, while the pureed ones used in the glaze give it a faint blush hue. The cake's overall appearance may not scream "strawberry!" but it lets the flavor do the talking, instead. Still, if you want to provide a more overt visual cue to the flavor, you can always affix a few berries on top.

Recipe: Strawberry Cake

Yo ho ho and a plateful of cake! Yes, we'll take this rum cake over a barrel of rum any day (not to mention the weevil-ridden hardtack that was also part of a pirate's daily fare). This cake gets a double dose of rum since the ingredient is used in the batter and also to flavor a syrup that soaks into the cake rather than sitting on top like a thicker glaze or frosting would do.

Recipe: Caribbean Rum Cake

While most angel food recipes call for using a two-piece tube pan, this cake is baked in a one-piece Bundt pan. Yay for double-duty pans! And also for super-easy recipes, since all you really need to make this is a box of cake mix and a can of crushed pineapple. The third ingredient is whipped cream, but that's just used as a topping so it's actually optional if you don't have it on hand.

Recipe: 3-Ingredient Pineapple Angel Food Cake

This butter cake isn't the St. Louis gooey kind that's really more of a bar cookie, nor is it a pound cake since it doesn't contain 16 ounces of butter and isn't baked in a loaf pan. Instead, it's a basic vanilla Bundt cake made extra-rich with sour cream and yes, a generous amount of butter. You can dress it up with the included vanilla glaze or dress it down with powdered sugar, but it would also taste great with ice cream, whipped cream, or berries.

Recipe: Glazed Butter Cake

If you've just had a power outage and the ice cream got all melty before you could eat it, don't throw it out! Food waste is always a shame, but even more so if it's something tasty. Instead, re-purpose the ice cream by making it into a Bundt cake with the addition of a box of cake mix and a few eggs. While the cake in this recipe is a vanilla one, any ice cream and cake mix flavors will work.

Recipe: 3-Ingredient Vanilla Cake

If Bundt cakes have been super-trendy in recent years, so, too, has salted caramel. What could be more natural than to combine the two? This cake is also a convenient way to use up any plain yogurt you have on hand, since for some reason they don't sell the stuff in single-serving containers. One note on the caramel glaze: Its salty flavor comes solely from the small amount of this ingredient found in the butter. If you really want your caramel to taste salty, though, you can sprinkle some coarse or flaky salt on top.

Recipe: Salted Caramel Cake

If you're Gen Z, a millennial, or even a younger Xer, the name "sock it to me" might not mean much to you, but it was a popular catchphrase in the '70s when this pecan-cinnamon cake first came to be. The original recipe was created in the Duncan Hines test kitchens so it called for boxed cake mix, but this version is scratch-made instead.

Recipe: Sock-It-To-Me Cake