I’m a sucker for easy old-fashioned recipes, lemme tell ya. The kinds that you’d find at a pot luck years ago, and still to this day. Meatballs in a grape jelly and chili sauce? Awesome. Watergate salad? Holy eff yes. Cuppa cake? UGH, SO GOOD.

Do you know what the cuppa cake is? It’s in Steel Magnolias, and variations on it are called a dump cake (haha dump), and it’s awesome. It’s so easy. And so oddly tasty although really sweet. Now, I have never actually made this cake until tonight, but I’m sad that I lived the last 22 years of my life without it, but also glad because I’d probably be at least 2 thousand pounds heavier.

The finished texture is slightly addicting. It gets really crispy and kind of chewy on the top (the best part), but the inside stays really moist and I might even go so far as to say slightly gummy (probably because I added a bit more than 1 cup of the cocktail+juice). Not in a bad way though. A lot of fruit in a cake will do that, all that moisture hanging around in there affects the batter around it.  Here’s a picture of a mass of it scooped out onto a plate after I took it out of my trusty toaster oven.  (love you toaster oven!)

Here’s the recipe!

Cuppa Cake

1 cup of self-rising flour (or 1 cup of all-purpose with 1 1/4 tsp baking powder and 1/4 tsp salt added)
1 cup of sugar
1 cup of fruit cocktail with juice

Preheat your oven to 350°F, butter an 8″ pan (I used a small 6″ square casserole dish since I don’t have any real baking pans at the moment and it was all I could find, and I like the thickness of the cake more than if it were in an 8″ pan I think). Mix all the ingredients together in a bowl, eat some batter, pour into the prepared pan and bake for about 30-40 minutes or until it’s golden brown and not squishy when you poke it gently with your finger. Serve it warm with some vanilla ice cream, or unsweetened whipped cream. So tasty!

Look how perfectly smooth I got that ball of ice cream. Awwwww yeah, you know how satisfying that is.

The melty cold of the ice cream is necessary with every bite, since the cake by itself seems almost too sweet. You could definitely use brown sugar and pineapple (squee!) , and maybe not use an entire cup of sugar if you wanted it less sweet. I probably wouldn’t use splenda either since that stuff is disgustingly sweet, but I reccomend making it per the recipe the first time you make it so that you can judge accordingly to your tastes! It’s not like this is an expensive thing to make. I’m poor as heck and I only had to spend $1.47 on a 14oz can of fruit cocktail (with extra cherries!). You could use any canned fruit you want! Or fresh fruit! But you’d need to add some sort of juice to replace the liquid of canned fruit.

Come on people, this is easy. And tasty. Sometimes you just gotta go back to the basics.

Ahhh, how I ♥ cake.