Pumpkin Cake with Cream Cheese Frosting

I like to think of pumpkin cake as pumpkin bread‘s slightly fancier relative. It’s just as homey and comforting and easy to make, but because it’s dessert you have an excuse to bury it in frosting. It’s no wonder it’s my favorite way to say hello to fall.

This pumpkin sheet cake is loaded with sweetly scented spices and topped with soft swoops of tangy cream cheese frosting. Making it is simple: Mix, pour, and bake. It’s also incredibly moist and stays soft for days, making it a very welcome treat for special occasions and midday snacking alike. Here’s how to do it.

For quintessential fall flavor, this cake leans on the classic pumpkin pie spice blend. Buying a store-bought version is the easiest route, or you can make your own blend instead. You can also just use a combination of ground cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, and clove — I’ve included the amounts in the notes below the recipe. For an extra pop of spice and some pretty color, I like to run a cinnamon stick or whole nutmeg over the Microplane to dust over the finished cake, but you can also just sprinkle on some more pumpkin pie spice.

A mixture of yogurt and oil helps keep the cake moist for days and lightens things up a bit. The slight tang of the yogurt also plays well with the tanginess of the cream cheese frosting. We’ve made this cake with regular and Greek yogurt, and both work well as long as it’s plain yogurt. Use full-fat if you can.

Although the cake can be mixed entirely by hand, I recommend using a stand or hand mixer for the frosting, which whips up the cream cheese, butter, and powdered sugar into soft, pillowy peaks that spread onto the cake like a dream. This frosting also holds up well in the refrigerator and doesn’t get hard or crusty, as I happily discovered when sneaking leftover pieces straight out of the fridge for a few days. This cake has become a family and friend favorite, and it deserves a place in your fall baking rotation too.