Crock-Pot cakes offer a solution for busy cooks who don’t have time to make dessert. Moisture is key for a successful cake, with scratch-made cakes being better than boxed mixes. Thicker ingredients like yogurt and sour cream work well, while chocolate, peanut butter, white chocolate, and fruit add flavor and moisture. However, moisture can also cause problems, so paper towels or plastic wrap can be used to absorb condensation.
Busy cooks on the go may not always have time to supplement dinner with dessert. Even instant cakes typically take at least an hour to prepare, bake, and cool. Crock-Pot cake offers a solution to these dilemmas. These cakes cook for several hours in a slow cooker, often resulting in a moist and delicious cake. Those pressed for time can whip up one of these cakes before sitting down to dinner, or even at the start of the day, and forget about it until it’s time for dessert.
A Crock-Pot cake requires lots of wet ingredients to help retain moisture. Long baking times can produce a dry and unappetizing cake if the batter isn’t moist enough. For this reason, cakes made from scratch usually turn out better than boxed cake mixes when cooked in a crock pot. Most boxed cake mixes have all the ingredients perfectly measured in the package and only require the addition of an egg and a small amount of oil or water. This amount of moisture generally does not withstand prolonged heating.
Butter, oils, milk, yogurt, pudding and sour cream provide extra moisture to a cake batter. When baking a Crock-Pot cake, thicker ingredients — like yogurt and sour cream — infuse a cake with moisture without making the batter too runny to prepare. However, these ingredients can also make the batter heavier. Therefore, the more these ingredients are added to a cake batter, the further the cake will lean away from the light, fluffy end of the pastry spectrum.
Chocolate cakes lend themselves especially well to Crock-Pot baking. Melted chocolate and chocolate pudding both add a significant amount of moisture to cake batter, making for the perfect mix for long baking times. A little extra oil in the batter can even take the recipe from chocolate cake to thick, moist chocolate brownies. Peanut butter, white chocolate, and fruit also lend a Crock-Pot pie flavor and essential moisture. Bakers can successfully create honey apple pie, blueberry buckle, and coffee cakes in a crock pot by adding those ingredients.
Moisture can create some problems when it comes to Crock-Pot cake. Steam from the cake can build up on the underside of the vessel lid. Condensation raining on the cake could ruin the texture. Paper towels, about 0.12 inches (about 3 mm) thick under the lid, should absorb this condensation. If paper towels mess up the seal around the slow cooker’s lip, plastic wrap draped over the top of the lid can help keep too much heat from escaping.
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