The Lazy Baker's Hack For A Fruity Angel Food Cake That Tastes Like Summer

While many of us love to watch skilled chefs and experienced home cooks create dazzling cakes and confections, attempting those complicated recipes ourselves is another story. Unless we're bakers by trade or even as a hobby, making a delicious, moist, visually appealing cake is a lot of work, but there's an easy way out. Among super-simple methods such as dump cakes for beginners and swapping out ingredients to upgrade your boxed cake mix, there's a foolproof recipe that tastes like summer using only two ingredients: angel food cake mix and a can of fruit cocktail.

Dotted with small pieces of pineapple, grapes, peaches, pears, and cherries, fruit cocktail is a canned foodstuff that evokes memories of elementary school lunches and old school diets that advised serving it atop a pile of cottage cheese. Among other hacks such as freezing fruit cocktail to prevent watered down drinks, you can add a can to a box of angel food cake mix to a can of fruit cocktail, then top it with whipped cream and more drained fruit cocktail for a light, sweet cake your friends and family will love. Just be sure to use canned fruit cocktail in fruit juice, as the type packed in syrup will add a lot of unneeded sugar to your cake.

Although combining fruit cocktail with boxed cake mix might seem brand new, there are similar recipes that have been around since the 1950s when boxed cake mix rose in popularity. Expanding upon the two ingredient-style "dump cake," other recipes call for a few more ingredients such as a couple of eggs, shredded coconut, and sprinkling the top with brown sugar before baking. Other methods include melted butter, chopped pecans, and boxed butter cake or yellow cake instead of angel food.

And of course, the world of canned fruits is hardly limited to fruit cocktail. You can try different iterations of the same concept using other fruits like canned peaches, pears, pineapple, or mandarins. Or, incorporate any combination of them for your own ideal tropical cake.

If all you need are two extra, ready-made ingredients (three including the whipped cream), there's no reason to make more work for yourself. After all, what's really important is spending time to share this easy treat with the people you love.