Intensely Flavorful, Super Moist Spice Cake

"I have been making a different spice cake annually for years and finally found one I will come back to again and again. Thank you for this delicious recipe, the chocolate frosting was a perfect touch!" - Liz

Why This Recipe Works

When I set out to create this recipe, I envisioned a cake that was intensely flavorful, supremely moist, rich and decadent, and super tender.

As I discovered, baking an intensely flavorful spice cake is NOT simply a matter of increasing the amount of spices in the batter. Ground spices like cinnamon, cloves, and nutmeg have a drying effect on cakes and adding too much of them results in a gritty, somewhat parched texture. Not really what I was going for.

After baking cake after cake after cake, I settled on a few techniques and ingredients that result in what I consider to be the Perfect Spice Cake....

1. Cooking (also called "blooming") the spices in oil intensifies their flavor and distributes their flavor more evenly throughout the cake.
2. Using a varied mix of spices - cinnamon, cardamom, allspice, cloves, nutmeg, and ginger - creates a complex, warm flavor with surprising depth.  
3. Using vegetable oil instead of butter creates lofty layers with a super moist, even crumb. 
4. Greek yogurt and applesauce add flavor and contribute just the right amount of acidity to give the cake a soft, tender, almost silky texture.
5. Dark brown sugar also helps to keep this cake moist while adding even more flavor.
6. Vanilla brings out the flavor in the spices while also rounding them out and bringing their different flavors together.
7. A touch of almond extract adds (you guessed it!) even more flavor as well as some nice complexity.

How to Bake an Intensely Flavorful Spice Cake

In cooking, there's an amazing trick to getting as much flavor as you possibly can from ground, dry spices: Cook them for a minute or two in fat. On my other cooking-focused recipe website (alittleandalot.com) you'll see this technique in nearly every recipe where dry spices are involved because it makes such a big difference to the flavor of a dish.

Cooking spices in a bit of fat is called "blooming" and it's essential if you want to coax every little bit of flavor from them. The process does two things:

1. Heat causes ground spices to release fat-soluble flavor compounds that would otherwise remain bound up inside the spices and hidden from your tastebuds
2. Fat molecules trap all that flavor and distribute it throughout the dish. 

Fat is a fabulous conductor of flavor, trapping flavor compounds and distributing them throughout foods so that they make contact with our taste buds in every single bite. So, when you heat spices in butter or oil for a few minutes, the flavor compounds in the spices transfer to the fat, which then happily spreads them around throughout the other ingredients. 

As I was trying to figure out a way to add more spice FLAVOR without increasing the amount of spices to the point of creating a dry, gritty texture, it occurred to me that that the answer was as simple as employing a technique I use practically every night while preparing dinner: let the spices bloom.

Happily, the technique works every bit as well in cake batter as it does in soup, sautés, and stir-fries.

The process is simple....

1.  Add some oil to a small skillet or saucepan and stir in the spices. 
2. Heat the pan over medium heat until the oil begins to simmer.
3. Cook the spices in the oil for a minute or so, then remove the pan from the heat and let the oil cool to room temperature.

After that, you simply mix it into the batter with the rest of the oil and let those fat molecules do what they do best - distribute all that flavor. Speaking of oil...

Why this Recipe Uses for Oil Instead of Butter

Like Olive Oil Cake, and my all-time favorite Ridiculously Good Carrot Cake, this spice cake recipe uses oil instead of butter.  When compared to butter, cakes baked with oil are loftier, have a more even crumb and stay moist and fresh tasting much longer.

So, why don’t all cake recipes use oil instead of butter? Because butter adds flavor.

Because I want it all, I often use a combination of butter and oil. Two of my other favorite cake recipes - Red Velvet Cake and Devil's Food Cake - use a combination of butter and oil that works like magic. You get the flavor of butter in a gorgeously tender, moist cake. 

In this cake, I decided to go with all oil because I wanted a super moist cake AND there is already SO much flavor in the other ingredients - spices, applesauce, yogurt, brown sugar, vanilla and almond extract - that the flavor contribution of butter wasn't really going to matter. 

Two Ingredients for a Tender, Moist, and Flavorful Cake

1. Greek Yogurt
2. Applesauce

Most varieties of cake benefit from a touch of acidity. Even slightly acidic ingredients add flavor and create a soft, tender crumb. In this recipe, most of the acid comes from Greek yogurt and applesauce.

Neither of these ingredients are super acidic, so they enhance the flavor of the cake rather than taking over.

In addition to adding flavor and tenderness, both Greek yogurt and applesauce help create a super moist cake that will stay that way for several days. 

What Kind of Frosting is Best with Spice Cake?

The traditional answer to that question is Cream Cheese Buttercream. BUT, before we get to that, I want to make the case for a more unusual option - Chocolate Buttercream.

The idea of combining warm spices like cinnamon and nutmeg with chocolate is not unusual in many places around the world. For example, Mexican chocolate includes cinnamon and sometimes other spices like nutmeg or allspice. And Moroccan chocolate desserts often include cardamom, cinnamon and orange peel.

So, icing a cake that’s packed with the flavors of cinnamon, nutmeg, cardamom, allspice, and ginger with chocolate buttercream is really not a unique idea. And, I really hope you'll hear me on this - The combination of flavors is interesting, complex, and absolutely delicious.

But also... Cream Cheese Buttercream on Spice Cake rocks.

Cream Cheese Buttercream is one of those magical confections that is as delicious as it is simple and easy to make. You basically put all the ingredients into a bowl, whip them together, and you’re done.

My FAVORITE recipe for Cream Cheese Buttercream includes equal amounts of butter and cream cheese and a touch of sour cream, which adds a lovely, subtle tang.

Three other delicious buttercream options:

1. American Buttercream. This classic American Buttercream recipe only takes a few minutes to make and is silky smooth and flavorful thanks to butter, heavy cream, vanilla and a touch of almond extract.
2. Italian Meringue Buttercream. Italian Meringue Buttercream is my all time favorite frosting for most cakes and cupcakes. It’s silky smooth, incredibly creamy, and absolutely gorgeous to work with.
3. White Chocolate Ganache Buttercream. This White Chocolate Ganache Buttercream tastes just like the inside of a really good white chocolate truffle. It's impossibly rich, and so smooth and satiny that it literally melts on your tongue.

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Spice Cake is a Building Block Recipe

Building block recipes are tried-and-true recipes that I consider foundational to great home baking. They are the kind of recipes I come back to over and over again, sometimes baking them as is, but often using them as a jumping off point to create something new. > Scroll through all Building Block recipes.