This recipe is part of an Easter recipe round-up with The World Is An Oyster! Check out the other great recipes featured!
Incredible Snickerdoodle Cake
Ingredients
For the cake:
- 1 ¾ cups all-purpose flour*
- ¼ cup cornstarch*
- 1 cup sugar
- 1 Tablespoon baking powder
- ¼ teaspoon salt
- 2 teaspoons cream of tartar
- 1 Tablespoon ground cinnamon
- 1 ¼ cups water
- ⅓ cup oil
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
- 3 large eggs
For the cream cheese frosting:
- 4 ounces cream cheese softened
- 1 ½ cups powdered sugar
- ½ teaspoon vanilla extract
- 2 Tablespoons milk
Instructions
For the cake:
- Preheat oven to 325 °F. Grease a 9×13 inch cake pan.
- In a large bowl, mix together flour, cornstarch, sugar, baking powder, salt, cream of tartar and ground cinnamon.
- Add in water, oil, vanilla extract and eggs and mix until well combined.
- Bake for 22-25 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean.
For the frosting:
- Beat cream cheese on medium speed with an electric mixer until fluffy, then add in the powdered sugar a little at a time.and beat until combined.
- Add vanilla extract and slowly pour in milk while mixer is still running.
Notes
Obligatory Fictional Backstory
It was my first time hosting Easter dinner and everything had to be perfect.
It didn’t help that the guest list included several world-renowned chefs and famous bakers.
I had perfected the dinner menu – Home-style Chicken Kiev (recipe coming to the blog next week) with roasted asparagus and homemade egg noodles – when suddenly I realized I had nothing to serve for dessert!
My mind began scrambling for ideas. Carrot cake? No, too common. Homemade Peeps? No, not sophisticated enough, and besides, I didn’t have time to make and mold the marshmallows by hand.
I thought and I thought…then remembered that one of the bakers attending had a widely known love of snickerdoodle cookies. I didn’t have time to make cookies, so what could I do? Then it dawned on me: I could make SNICKERDOODLE CAKE!
Thus, this Incredible Snickerdoodle Cake was born. Light, fluffy, full of cinnamon with just that hint of tartness from the cream of tartar – it was perfection! My guests all thought so, too.
Real Talk
I originally made this Snickerdoodle Cake using a box mix and adding some cinnamon to it, but I decided that I would prefer to make it from scratch. It took a few tries to perfect but this one is just…AMAZING. It only lasted 2 days in our house. If you like cinnamon, you’ll love this cake.
A couple of notes:
I would not recommend substituting butter and milk for the oil and water. That was how I made my first cake (though I used more butter than I ended up using oil) and it turned out really, really, REALLY dense. Like a pound cake. Stick with the oil and water.
If you want to make it look a little fancier, try baking it in a well-greased and floured Bundt pan. It’ll take a little longer to bake (probably close to 40 minutes). Let it cool for 10 minutes then turn it out – if you wait until it’s completely cooled it will stick, if you try to turn it out immediately it will fall apart.
The cream of tartar makes a big flavor difference so I do recommend that you use it. That’s what makes it a Snickerdoodle Cake rather than a Cinnamon Cake. But if you don’t have any, just leave it out altogether – don’t substitute anything for it (it doesn’t do anything for leavening, just flavor).
Do soften and mix the cream cheese before you add the powdered sugar, lest you end up with the mess I did when I made my No-Bake Cheesecake Dip!
