40+ Vibrant Cakes to Make This Spring

Perfect for birthdays, showers, or special get-togethers, this flower-topped layer cake is so pretty you won’t want to cut it! Made with a lemon cake mix and Lemon Buttercream frosting, it’s incredibly simple to make, even though it looks impressive. Top with a ring of edible flowers and prepare for complements.

Poke cake meets pound cake in this must-make spring dessert. A perfectly moist, dense vanilla pound cake (with a delightful hint of almond) is filled with a fresh strawberry filling—adding to the cake's tender crumb and providing the perfect fruity sweet-tart flavor balance. Finish the whole thing off with an eye-catching fresh strawberry glaze, and you have a supremely awesome cake on your hands. Be warned, if you share this pound cake with friends, you'll need to be ready to share the recipe as well. 

Make this easy dessert a day before serving, as you'll have to refrigerate it overnight. 

You’ve got dessert duty? We’ve got you covered with this lightly spiced sheet cake that serves a crowd and travels well too. Why choose between carrot cake and coconut cake when both flavors work so well together?

Layer cakes might be the cover girls, but a pound cake holds sway in our Southern kitchens. This recipe reflects the Southern practice of adding a bit of liqueur or other spirits to a cake to ensure it stays moist and delicious. This recipe first appeared in the beloved cookbook, Tea-Time at the Masters, in 1977. While the original recipe called for the cake to be baked in a tube pan, we opted for mini Bundt pans for a tea party-worthy presentation. The orange liqueur glaze gives the simple orange pound cake an explosion of flavor.

One of the most popular vegetables of the summer is zucchini, turning up as cheesy casseroles, fried appetizers, and warm breads. Go one step further and make this chocolate cake, guaranteed to become your go-to recipe for birthday celebrations, potlucks, and simple weeknight desserts. This impressive yet easy-to-make cake got rave reviews in our Test Kitchen and quickly developed a cult following. It’s packed with plenty of green stuff (two medium zucchini), but your family will be too distracted by the chocolate flavor and the nutty brown butter frosting to notice that they are eating vegetables. For optimal texture, shred the zucchini on the large holes of a box grater. A tasty frosting is the crowning touch on a cake, and this Brown Butter-Pistachio Frosting has just the right sweet-salty balance to partner with the deep chocolate cake. Browning butter is a French cooking technique that, when used, can take a recipe from good to fabulous.

Pair the crowd-pleasing appeal of peach cobbler with the convenience factor of a boxed cake mix and you have this ridiculously easy dump cake. Requiring only five ingredients, this is the perfect recipe for when you need to whip up dessert in a hurry. We love the combination of peaches and almonds, but you could easily swap the sliced almonds called for with your favorite nut (pecan halves would be excellent) or eliminate the nuts altogether. Either way, one thing’s for certain—this peach cobbler dump cake will be a hit for any occasion. 

For a festive occasion, few treats can match the celebratory spirit of a classic birthday cake—and this easy-to-follow formula is the only one you’ll ever need. Our birthday cake recipe yields two dense layers of buttery, vanilla-forward white cake wrapped in classically rich buttercream frosting. For the signature, picture perfect birthday cake look, don’t forget to garnish your frosted cake with rainbow sprinkles. You can also stir a handful of colored sprinkles right into the cake batter  to create a funfetti effect.

Orange flavor turns up often in African-American cookbooks, whether the cook enlivens biscuits with a bit of sweet citrus juice or uses it to make pecan pie extra special. Mildred “Mama Dip” Council included two recipes for orange-flavored cake in Mama Dip’s Family Cookbook, her collection of recipes and reminiscences. One is a rich butter cake laced with fresh juice and grated zest. The other relies on an orange cake mix that’s “doctored up” with Mountain Dew. The poke cake featured here, inspired by the latter, is filled with a tangy citrus curd made with Nehi orange-flavored soda. —Toni Tipton-Martin

Inspired by her Aunt Julie’s blackberry jam cake, Damaris Phillips created this showstopping version. The caramel cream cheese frosting is slightly savory to balance out the sweetness of this three-layer cake.

This simple, fresh strawberry cake is the perfect springtime dessert. Besides being wonderfully easy to slice and serve for a crowd, sheet cakes (like this pink beauty) are great for entertaining because they require no special cake frosting skills to look impressive. 

Everything you love about classic Italian tiramisu, layered into an impressive cake. 

The nuanced brightness of sumac matched with warming notes of almond and jammy raspberries takes a classic pound cake construct over the top and into pure wow-worthy territory. While it may seem like a lot between the batter and the pound cake’s raspberry-sumac glaze (especially if this is a new seasoning to you), sumac—which is the dried, powdered berries of the sumac bush—is a spice you need not be overly reserved with. Given sumac’s delicate tart flavor, a fair amount is needed here to shine within the context of the dense, buttery cake.  

Time to oust your box cake mix, and embrace your inner baker with this basic yellow cake formula. This recipe will raise your cake-crafting confidence to new heights the first time you try it. As the name suggests, the numbers represent the measurements of the ingredients in the cake. Just remember what number matches with which ingredient, and you can easily memorize this recipe to whip up anytime you please. The buttery yellow cake is moist and has a perfectly dense crumb. Consider the 1-2-3-4 Cake a blank canvas; have fun adding layers of your buttercream frosting, whipped cream with fruit, or your own favorite frosting. One key to keep in mind when making this cake is that you really do need to have your butter softened and, ideally, your eggs at room temperature. Mixing these ingredients in when cold makes them more difficult to incorporate and can yield a “broken” batter. When baking the cake, be sure to use a light baking pan to help prevent over-browning. If you see that the top of your cake is brown, but the center is still wet, make a foil tent over the cake to keep it from getting darker. 

Layers of cool and creamy ice cream, sweet pound cake, and juicy fresh fruit hit the spot on a hot day. You only need seven ingredients to create this show-stopping dessert which is guaranteed to be a hit at your next summer party. Here is the secret to getting clean and neat slices: run hot water over the blade of your knife, wipe it with a moist towel, and cut. Do this for each slice. While prep time is only 20 minutes, this dessert needs at least 8 hours of freezing time, so be sure and plan ahead if you want to make this for a gathering.

This is a namesake because Nathan Coulon's mom baked it for his birthday every year. We've adapted this lemon cake recipe to trim the fat and calories, and it's still a moist, lemony treat.

"Ultimate" is no exaggeration here—this cake features coconut flour, coconut oil, coconut milk, coconut cream, coconut sugar, coconut extract, and (of course) flaked coconut. Given this cake's incredibly moist layers, intense coconut flavor, and lighter-than-air filling, our test kitchen chefs fought over the leftovers.

This vegan cake (no eggs or butter!) is so delicious that our kids begged for more. The frosting is silky smooth, and the cake is light and loaded with chocolate flavor, and healthy fats.

Just 7 ingredients - and all of them common pantry staples - are all you need for this rich classic pound cake recipe.

The delicate blance of sweet, bitter and citrus that makes the cocktail so refreshing also makes for an unusual citrus cake. The inclusion of the orange juice and the Aperol gives the frosting a citrus note, too. 

One of our testers called this "the ultimate banana pudding in cake form." Tender laters of cake, creamy vanilla custard, and bananas come together to create a mouthwatering dessert. Warning: There won't be leftovers. 

These layers are tender, so remove from pans carefully!

Pound cake is easy to make and infinitely variable. When plain, you can almost defend it as a breakfast or afternoon snack. But dressed up with any manner of fruit or cream or ice cream or other garnish, it can hang at everything from a backyard barbecue to an elegant dinner party. So, it occurred to me that perhaps I might mash-up one of my go-to summer desserts with one of my go-to summer drinks!

This rum and Coke pound cake benefits from the same attention to detail as my version of the cocktail. European-style butter (I like Kerrygold or Plugra for this), light brown sugar to pick up the caramel notes in the cola and the rum, and vanilla paste which has all those lovely vanilla seeds in it and is closer to using fresh vanilla pod than extract. 

Fresh flowers make this cake simply gorgeous—no decorating skills required! Simply choose edible blooms and petals (such as Carnations, English daisies, freesia, lavender, nasturtium, pansies, peonies, roses, stock, sweet William, tuberous begonias, or violets) For a smooth finish, dip a knife or offset spatula in hot water; then wipe it dry before frosting the cake.

This vibrant pink layer cake is pure strawberry-on-strawberry goodness, with fresh strawberries going into the cake batter and frosting. One thing to note about the buttercream frosting—it is absolutely bursting with berry flavor, but is easily over-mixed. If you find you've broken your emulsion when whipping this frosting up, no worries. You can simply mix in a little more powdered sugar to restore it. That said, we love how purely strawberry-forward the flavor of this frosting is, so we'd advise being very light-handed when adding extra powdered sugar, as it will dilute the berry flavor. In our opinion, it's better to have a slightly broken frosting that tastes like strawberries than a perfectly pristine frosting that tastes like sugar. 

Chocolate sheet cakes were popular among early 20th-century cooks from Kentucky to California. Dr Pepper cake takes its cues from those recipes. Fragrant with spices like ground cinnamon, cloves, and nutmeg and topped with chocolate frosting, that’s speckled with pecans, it may remind some of Texas sheet cake. For nearly 20 years, I baked a version of this sweet treat to celebrate the birthday of a friend and neighbor from Wichita Falls, Texas, who was haunted (in a good way) by her childhood memories of the delicious dessert. —Toni Tipton-Martin

Fresh summer peaches turn sticky and sweet when baked in the bottom of a Bundt pan with butter and brown sugar. After you place the peach slices in the ridges of the pan, gently spoon the cake batter over the fruit, then smooth the top with an offset spatula.

The addition of cinnamon adds a kick of “something special” to this rich chocolate sheet cake, but if you prefer, you can reduce the amount or leave the cinnamon out all together; you will simply have a delightful, classic chocolate cake on your hands. Once topped off with a decadent chocolate-cream cheese frosting, this cake is ready to please at virtually any event you bring it to.

This recipe is from the cookbook, Stop and Smell the Rosemary, by the Junior League of Houston. This pound cake is sublime in its simplicity, but we decided to fancy it up a bit with a Bundt pan and two contrasting icings. You can leave out the yellow food coloring gel and have a cake that is just as pretty with a few extra lemon and orange slices for garnish. The Lemon-Orange Pound Cake is perfect for a bridal shower or a spring tea.

Zucchini makes a brilliant addition to carrot cake, adding a verdant note to the sweet carrot.