Behold! The gooey-est, yummiest, chocolaty-est yellow cake ever!

I don’t know about you but I LOVE that classic yellow cake with chocolate frosting! If the yellow cake has that old-fashioned caramel flavor, all the better. I will sniff this stuff out at a vegan pot luck, huff it till I sneeze chocolate then hoard it, if possible. Yes I will.

I also have an old-fashioned love for boxed cake mixes. And my favorite dairy-free cake mix brand—BAR NONE— is Cherrybrook Kitchen®. They make the best boxed yellow cake mix I’ve had, including the old Duncan Hines from my childhood.

I also like to dress up my cakes beyond just the basic box mix. In this yellow cake, I added chocolate chips for melty goodness and sprinkled pecans on the icing while it was melting on the hot cake. I didn’t mess with trying to make a multi-layer or bundt cake. I just created a simple 9×13 cake. To do this, you will need two of the cake mix boxes and one of the frosting box shown above.

SnarkyVegan’s Outrageously Gooey Yellow Cake with Chocolate Frosting and Doodads

Cake:

  • 2 boxes of Cherrybrook Kitchen® yellow cake mix
  • 2/3 cup melted margarine (I used Earth Balance)
  • 1  1/2 cup water
  • 1/2 to 3/4 bag of chocolate chips as your melty doodad (use however many you want)

Frosting:

  • 1 box Cherrybrook Kitchen® chocolate frosting mix
  • 1 cups of softened margarine (2 sticks)
  • 2 T. soy or rice milk

More Doodads:

  • 1 cup of chopped pecans
  1. Preheat oven to 350°F and grease a 9×13 inch casserole dish.
  2. Mix all ingredients in a large bowl. You can use a mixer like they say on the box but a spoon works just fine.
  3. Pour batter into casserole dish and smooth to corners.
  4. Bake for 35 to 40 minutes or until toothpick comes out clean. The box says 20 to 25 minutes but that’s for a small single layer. Since I used two boxes, it took a tad longer.
  5. While the cake is cooling, make the frosting by blending the frosting ingredients in a deep bowl on medium speed for 2 minutes. Scrape sides to get everything incorporated.
  6. Frost the cooled cake gently applying the frosting texture you want. If you like a more textured frosting, you can keep it in the fridge for a bit while the cake is cooling.
  7. Sprinkle lightly with chopped pecans.

What I did that wasn’t on the box: I wanted my frosting to be really melty and flat as if I poured it on so I applied the frosting while the cake was still very warm. I could see the frosting melting in the hot spots and it sort of smoothed out to a fairly even surface. Unfortunately, this meant I had to wait to cut it because all the frosting would run into the empty space left by the first piece. You have no idea how hard it was to wait.

NOTE: The box says not to use tub margarine and to not melt the margarine, only to soften the sticks at room temperature. I didn’t have any sticks so I went ahead and used Earth Balance tub margarine and it seemed to work just fine. Perhaps there are other margarines that don’t work well from the tub?

Cherrybrook Kitchen® also makes a ready-to-use vanilla frosting. But you’d be best not to waste time nor money on it cuz it sucks like Elmer’s glue. Not fluffy. Not frosting like. Weird funky taste. Looks strangely translucent. ICK.

BUT, their box mixes and box frostings are awesome. Stick to the boxed stuff and you can’t go wrong.

I thought about doing all kinds of extra things to the cake but seriously, yellow cake is pretty perfect by itself. I even considered making a caramel sauce to drizzle on the cake but the yellow cake is already so caramelly, I thought it would be overkill. And with the chocolate frosting? Well, I honestly doubt that you’ll be able to eat a second helping of this without going into a sugar …… comma ….

<1 hour later>

……what?

Wait!

How long have I been out?