What is your favorite type of cake?

Dessert is a celebratory course in any culinary tradition. With the discovery of sugar, societies all over the globe have devised a plethora of baked delicacies, sweets, and sweet beverages to commemorate significant events.

Plate With Slice Of Tasty Homemade Chocolate Cake

Cake is one of the most beloved desserts on the planet, and they come in all shapes and flavors. If you like dessert, you undoubtedly have strong feelings about your favorite sweet treat.

You may have the same cake flavor every year for your birthday or treat yourself to a piece from your favorite bakery on a slow Sunday afternoon.

Unfortunately, it’s hard to try new cakes when you seldom get to eat them. That being said, there are so many delicious cake varieties to try.

Most Popular Cake Flavors

Experimenting with various tastes outside of your cake box may result in a new favorite. Check out the following list of the most popular cake flavors to inspire your next cake order or home baking endeavor.

Chocolate Cake

While both sugar and chocolate originated in the Americas, it was Europeans who mixed the two to produce the sweet, decadent variety we know and love today.

Baking chocolate is available in both solid and liquid forms, although both are bitter and must be sweetened.

Chocolate Cake is a light, fluffy baked delicacy that is frequently topped with chocolate icing.

Chocolate Cake consists of flour, sugar, cocoa powder, eggs, canola oil, milk, water, baking powder, baking soda, vanilla extract, and espresso powder. The chocolaty taste is enhanced by the espresso powder.

In my chocolate cake, I prefer to use chocolate buttercream and top it with fresh strawberries and blueberries for both beauty and a small acidity to counteract the richness.

Cheesecake

Cheesecake is one of the earliest types of cake, dating back millennia before the discovery of sugar in Ancient Greece.

Cheesecake as we know it now began with the manufacture of cream cheese in New York around the mid-nineteenth century.

Cheesecake comes in a variety of flavors, and each culture has its own variation.

In the states, the most famous cheesecake is the New York cheesecake, made with cream cheese, sour cream, sugar, eggs, lemon juice, and vanilla that’s combined and poured over a graham cracker and butter crust. I like it with strawberries in strawberry syrup, but there are several other topping alternatives.

Some cultures use cottage cheese or another soft cheese for the cream. Japanese cheesecakes, for example, use gelatin and are much fluffier and lighter than the dense New York Cheesecake.

Red Velvet Cake

Red Velvet Cake, a true American tradition, is a kind of chocolate cake that evolved from the chocolate devil’s food cake by utilizing cocoa powder instead of melted chocolate bars.

A red velvet cake gets its crimson hue from beetroot juice, which bakers used to color their cakes in the early twentieth century.

Although Red Velvet Cake originated in the northeast, it has grown in popularity in the South.

The ingredients for Red Velvet Cake include flour, sugar, eggs, shortening, butter, vegetable oil, red food coloring, vinegar, cocoa powder, and buttermilk.

Although traditional red velvet cake utilizes flour buttercream frosting, I prefer cream cheese icing.

White Cake / Vanilla

Although vanilla has a reputation for being boring, it is far from that.

Vanilla is derived from a tropical Mexican orchid and is one of the most vital components in any kind of dish.

If you look at the ingredients list of any cake, chocolate bar, pastry, or pie, you will surely discover vanilla.

A white cake or vanilla cake consists of flour, butter, vegetable shortening, sugar, eggs, baking powder, salt, whole milk, buttermilk, and vanilla extract. It’s similar to the sugar cookie of cakes.

If you can’t decide between chocolate and vanilla buttercream, frost the white cake with chocolate buttercream.

Ice Cream Cake

Instead of cake and ice cream, combine them into one delicious treat! Ice Cream Cake is a delicate combination of a thin baked cake layered between thicker layers of ice cream.

They come in all kinds of flavor combinations.

In my opinion, Ice Cream Cakes are best left to the professionals because they’re tedious and challenging to make. Most ice cream businesses, however, provide personalized ice cream cakes.

A hot fudge and Oreo ice cream cake, with a chocolate cake with chocolate fudge frosting on top of a thick layer of Oreo ice cream, is my favorite ice cream cake.

The chocolate cake and fudge are then covered with a layer of chocolate buttercream and chopped Oreo biscuits.

Sponge Cake

Sponge Cake is a naturally fat-free and deliciously light cake made with sugar, flour, and egg whites.

Today’s recipes include milk, baking powder, and vinegar. As its name implies, sponge cake is porous and absorbs any flavored liquid you pair it with.

Sponge Cake is often covered with fresh fruit in a simple syrup and topped with whipped cream.

If you’ve ever eaten strawberry shortcake, the cake recipe was probably based on a regular sponge cake.

I love Sponge Cake because it’s the only cake I always feel guilt-free after eating. It’s also lightweight enough to justify a second piece!

Devil’s Food Cake

A Devil’s Food Cake, ironically, has more chocolate than a chocolate cake. Thus, if you’re a chocoholic, I recommend searching for a Devil’s Food Cake recipe.

Devil’s Food Cake is another American invention that dates back to the turn of the century. It uses solid baking chocolate squares melted into the batter instead of cocoa powder.

Nevertheless, newer recipes have substituted cocoa powder for baking chocolate squares, claiming that cocoa powder has a more strong chocolate taste.

Devil’s Food Cake uses fewer eggs than a chocolate cake and contains flour, sugar, and baking soda. The use of more baking soda darkens the color of the Devil’s Food Cake.

In my opinion, a devil’s food cake is exceptionally moist and decadent. I enjoy it with a simple semi-sweet chocolate and heavy cream icing.

Pumpkin Spice Cake

Nothing says autumn like pumpkin spice! It may be in a latte, pie, and even scented candle form, but a pumpkin spice cake is always welcome at a holiday party.

Instead of being totally coated with icing, it’s normally cooked in a bundt pan and drizzled with it.

The moist foundation of Pumpkin Spice Cake is made up of canned pumpkin puree, flour, butter, eggs, and vanilla extract.

Flour, cinnamon, allspice, sugar, brown sugar, baking soda, baking powder, and crystallized ginger make up the dry ingredients.

The drizzle is made from heavy cream and powdered sugar. I love the dense texture and spicy taste of ginger, cinnamon, and allspice.

Strawberry Cake

Strawberry Cake is a catch-all phrase for any cake that incorporates sliced strawberries into the cake batter, tops the cake with fresh strawberries, infuses the frosting with strawberry syrup, or combines all three.

If you like strawberries, the more strawberries there are in a strawberry cake, the better.

A Strawberry Shortcake is a strawberry cake with a sponge cake that absorbs fresh strawberry juice and cream with fresh-cut strawberry filling.

Giada de Laurentis, a Food Network celebrity chef, recently shared the ideal strawberry cake recipe with me.

To the whipped cream and honey topping, I added fresh whole strawberries doused in simple syrup.

Angel Food Cake

Angel Food Cake is Sponge Cake with one important ingredient added: cream of tartar.

Angel Food Cake is a more recent kind of sponge cake that emerged in the United States. It consists of egg whites whipped until stiff and combined with cake flour, cream of tartar, sugar, and vanilla extract.

Angel Food Cake is often baked in a bundt pan and has a huge hole in the middle.

Angel Food Cake is used in a variety of ways in American culture, from wedding cakes to funeral cakes.

As a summer treat, I like to top angel food cake with fresh mixed berries and a lemon icing.

Pound Cake

Pound Cake, the heaviest and densest of all flour-based cakes, is the polar opposite of Angel Food Cake.

The name is derived from the original recipe, which asked for one pound of each of the four essential cake ingredients: butter, sugar, flour, and eggs.

Pound cake is the richest and most luxurious cake, and it is normally served without icing. It’s also one of the only cakes that exclusively use a loaf pan and gets sliced into thick pieces.

A coffee shop will always have some form of pound cake.

The usual varieties include vanilla, marble, orange, walnut, and hazelnut. My personal favorite, though, is lemon poppyseed with vanilla glaze.

Carrot Cake

Carrot Cake has a special place in my heart and is always the cake I request for my birthday. It’s always juicy, deliciously flavored, and has a rich textural profile.

There are many variations, but the basic carrot cake recipe contains shredded carrots, flour, eggs, sugar, canola oil, cinnamon, and nutmeg. It’s one of the few cakes that doesn’t include butter.

Before baking, fresh walnuts or chopped pecans, raisins, crushed pineapple, and/or shredded coconut are included into the dough.

Cream cheese icing is often used on carrot cake. I like to add chopped toasted pecans to the perimeter of the cream-cheese frosted cake.

Butter Cake

A butter cake is a kind of pound cake that comes in a variety of shapes and tastes.

Butter cake, like pound cake, is normally without frosting and contains at least a full cup of butter, as well as flour, eggs, and sugar.

Yet, unlike pound cake, butter cake comes in a variety of shapes, ranging from bundt cake to the gooey butter cake bars popular in the deep South.

The fundamental step for making Butter Cake is creaming the butter and sugar until light and fluffy.

While the gooey butter cake is interesting, I prefer a lighter, fluffier butter cake with chocolate icing.

Funfetti Cake

The Funfetti Cake, a bright and colorful cake made by adding rainbow sprinkles to a white cake batter, is a relatively recent innovation.

The sprinkles dissolve into colorful polka dots while the cake bakes.

In high-end bakeries, there has recently been a Funfetti Cake fad in which bakers extract a cylinder of cake from the middle and fill it with colorful sprinkles and rainbow candies.

When you cut into it, all of the candy falls out with your slice.

Pre-made Funfetti Cake is available in boxes. I like it with vanilla buttercream frosting and extra sprinkles on top.

Marble Cake

Marble Cake, as the name indicates, is a cake that is marbled by combining a darker or different colored batter with a lighter batter.

Marble cake comes in a variety of flavors, including chocolate and vanilla marble cake and coffee and spice marble cake.

The first marble cake was a German invention called Kugelhopf, which was a combination of white cake batter and molasses-spice cake batter.

Marbling a cake involves adding a smaller quantity of darker batter to the lighter batter and gently swirling it around with a knife or fork.

My favorite coffee shop’s marbled chocolate and vanilla pound cake.

Pistachio Cake

Pistachios are sweet, buttery, and nutty, and they make an excellent flavoring ingredient for sweets.

It’s most often found in Italian pastries like biscotti and gelato. And if you liked it in cookie or ice cream form, you’ll probably love it in a cake.

Pistachio Cake incorporates pulverized pistachios into the cake mix as well as whole or chopped pistachios.

The batter uses butter, eggs, flour, ground and whole pistachios, sugar, baking powder, cream of tartar, and baking soda. The end product is a lovely faintly green cake.

I ice it with mascarpone frosting and top with chopped pistachios and edible flowers.

Cookie Cake

A cookie cake, in my opinion, is more of a large cookie with icing piping on top than a cake.

You can make a cookie cake in whatever flavor you like, from chocolate chip to snickerdoodle. To make a cookie cake, you simply increase the proportions and baking time of your favorite cookie dough.

Use a rectangle or round cake pan to equally pack the cookie dough, bake it, and then frost the cookie using a piping tip.

If you don’t like cake and like the concept of a huge cookie, the Cookie Cake is for you.

I’d never say no to a piece of chocolate chip cookie cake topped with chocolate and vanilla icing.

Final Thoughts

Cakes are joyous and exquisite treats that give every occasion a reason to rejoice.

Whether you like baking or browsing the bakery case, you’ll discover endless recipes and variations of the most popular cake flavors I’ve included above.

Enjoy the best of both worlds with ice cream as well – while you’re here, browse the most popular ice cream varieties!