How To Make a One-Bowl Vanilla Cake

Sometimes you need a cake — like, now — and getting out a stand mixer and dirtying a few bowls isn’t ideal. It’s often in these situations we lean on cake mixes to get a cake in the oven. Inspired by the virtues of cake mix (it is easy and reliable, after all) we set out to create an everyday vanilla cake — something sweet but sturdy and resilient that we could quickly turn into everything from an everyday coffee cake to cupcakes to a giant ice cream cake sandwich.

Honestly, this cake can come together faster than your oven will preheat. So go set it to 350°F and then come back here to learn how to make this universal cake. It can be as simple or as stunning as you choose, and it will bake up at least a dozen different ways — all of them buttery, fragrant, and delicious.

The very basic batter for this cake relies solely on pantry staples — all-purpose flour, eggs, oil, and milk — and it bakes up into a mighty-fine vanilla cake. However, you can make a single ingredient swap and bake up a better cake. Here are three tiny swaps that make this cake even better.

• Use cake flour. I don’t always keep cake flour on hand, but when I do and I bake this cake, the crumb is finer and the cake is more tender. Use cake flour if you really want to turn this cake into a celebration cake.
• Swap butter for oil. Melting and cooling butter adds about five minutes of prep time to this cake, but it does make a more flavorful cake. Use butter when you want all the flavors of a rich yellow cake from this cake mix.
• Use whatever milk you’ve got. I have made this cake several times with almond milk to great success. I’ve used half-and-half in a pinch and 2% on a whim, so feel free to swap the whole milk for a milk alternative or whatever you have on hand.

This one-bowl vanilla cake skips the creaming; the dry ingredients are mixed with the wet ingredients, much like a muffin batter. Like a muffin batter, we also want to avoid overmixing. Overmixing results in tunneling and toughness in the final cake, which is also why I prefer hand mixing this cake as opposed to using a hand mixer.

Here’s the magic of this one bowl vanilla cake: You can bake it in two 9-inch cake pans, in a 9×13-inch baking dish, a rimmed baking sheet, as cupcakes, or even in a Bundt pan. We’ve used all of these with great success, creating everything from an upside-down banana cake to playful funfetti cupcakes.