Our 10 Favorite Birthday Cake Recipes

If you’re thinking about making someone (or yourself) a birthday cake, do it. They’ll appreciate it, maybe even love it, and you’ll enjoy that you took the time to bake for someone else. It’s a win-win that’s usually covered in frosting. However, before you get too far along, please consider the three tenets of birthday cake baking: First, the cake should feed a lot of people and not take itself too seriously. Second, it helps if it’s delicious, but it never needs to be perfect. Third, if you pick any of the recipes listed below, you’ll do a great job.

1. Rick's Birthday Cake

Thanks to Resident Rick Martínez, you can make cake for “50 people” with just a sheet tray and a large bowl. While the size and convenience of this birthday slab are impressive, its best feature is its buttercream frosting inspired by chocolate-covered malted milk balls.

2. Ultimate Chocolate Cake

This is the cake that Resident Baking Expert Erin McDowell made to celebrate Food52’s 10th Birthday. It packs as much chocolate into a single cake as is physically possible—and it’s all the better for it.

3. Grown-Up Birthday Cake

Grown-up but not at all boring, this traditional looking chocolate-frosted yellow cake uses olive instead of vegetable, adds wine to the batter, and replaces the middle layer of frosting with raspberry jam. These adjustments create a complex, rich flavor while allowing the cake to look exactly like the one you once demolished at Chuck E. Cheese.

4. White Sheet Cake

Unlike the boxed mix cakes of my childhood, this white sheet cake from Erin McDowell is lifted by the subtle but steady combination of almond and vanilla. Also, the frosting is white, meaning it’s the ideal canvas for an aspiring frosting artist.

5. Butter & Scotch's Birthday Cake

From Brooklyn-based bakery Butter & Scotch comes a vanilla cake that's big on flavor and light on flour. Born from an accident, this cake was originally supposed to have double its current amount of flour, but after tasting the “mistake” version (and realizing it was the best vanilla cake they’d ever had), Butter & Scotch founders Allison Kave and Keavy Landreth figured that “mistake” would be worth making again and again.

6. School-Party Sheet Cake

This is a chocolate zucchini cake topped with sweet potato frosting that looks exactly like a box cake. In my youth, I’d recognize this as a covert operation from the Fun Police. Today, it seems like a great way to pack moisture and subtlety into a cake that could otherwise get boring fast.

7. Ice Cream Cake

I might’ve missed out on prime Joni Mitchel and Neil Young, but as a child of the ’90s, I did get to enjoy (and consume) the best thing that came from the 70's: Carvel, Friendly’s, and Baskin Robbins ice cream cakes. If you, or the person whose birthday it is agrees with me (which I’m sure they do), make them this cake and they’ll forever love you.

8. Meyer Lemon Cheesecake With Biscoff Crust

Cheesecake is often overbearing. It’s usually just too much cheese, sugar, and density for me to want an entire slice of it. But when it comes to this lemon cheesecake, those qualms couldn’t be further from the truth. The additional acidity—as well as the Biscoff crust—balance the cake’s rich filling, turning it into something I’ll always want seconds of.

9. Caroline's Carrot Cake

Carrot cake is my preferred birthday cake and here’s why: It’s always moist, it’s even better the next day, and—as long as the icing isn’t too sweet—you’re likely going to have more than one piece. Bonus: This particular recipe takes less than three hours.

10. Basic Vanilla & Chocolate Cupcakes

Serving a cake at a free-flowing party can be difficult. You need to cut slices, those slices need plates, and those plates need silverware. There are a whole bunch of hoops to jump through, and sometimes, you just don’t want to do it. In those moments, turn to these cupcakes from Erin McDowell.

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What’s your go-to birthday cake? Let us know in the comments below!