Full sheet pan cake recipes

[Blue_playwright]

Hi! Lurker since the Bush selection, couldn’t stay quiet with the Orange Menace in office so I’ve started posting. :waves:

I’ve been asked to bring in a dessert for the funeral reception of a friend at church. They expect 300-400 and there are only a half dozen of us baking.

I have a professional oven (I’m a writer so that means I have a real career in food! Lol), and full sheet pans that fit perfectly. I just can’t find a good, simple cake recipe for a full sheet online. Everything seems to be half sheets, etc. I’m most worried about bake times.

I’ve got a fantastic frosting so even just a simple white or yellow cake would work.

Any resources or recipes?

[MFM008]

1. For all recipies

I turn to allrecipie.com.
A vast wealth of cooking info.

[GentryDixon]

4. Allrecipes.com is my go to.

I love Chef John. His recipes are great & the video instructions are wonderful. I love his inflection as he is narrating the menu. "And as always, enjoy!"

[DetlefK]

2. Use basic muffin-batter, pour it into a sheet, sprinkle with pitted cherries. Bake. Done.

[Bayard]

3. Cooks.com

I use it all the time

[Clarity2]

5. This is a secret family recipe

Ok, so it's sort of a cheat recipe, but this is the best coffee cake you will ever taste (cake is much moister than entenmann's). If you're interested in a large sheet of coffee cake as opposed to a traditional cake with frosting.

It's done using a large cookie sheet pan with a rim (cooking time is based on approx 15.5 x 10.5 x 1 inch deep)

Crumbs (do prior):

3/4 c sugar
1 1/2 tsp cinnamon
1 1/2 cups butter or margarine
3 cups flour

Mix crumbs well and refrigerate for a few hrs or overnight or freeze for an hr. I put in a ziploc bag and flatten to
chill faster.
-------------------------
Cake Ingredients:

Dunkin Hines All Butter Cake Recipe - make according to ingredients on box
Pour into greased pan (I sometimes use parchment paper on the bottom)

Cook at 350F for 20 min. When done, put crumbs on cake and cook another 20 min at 350F. Let cool, and sprinkle with powdered sugar.

It feeds a good amount of people!

[Blue_playwright]

13. Thank you so much!

That is a fabulous recipe!

[Clarity2]

18. You're welcome!

I sometimes make it an apple crumbcake and throw apple slices in the cake. It's delish.

[dem in texas]

6. White cake

My standard sheet cake is a white cake with buttercream frosting topped with coconut What I don't tell anyone is that I make the cake from a mix. I doctor up the mix by decreasing the oil by half and adding a stick of softened butter, moee flavoring, vanilla and almond. I put all the emphasis on the frosting, making a rich, fluffy frosting with powdered sugar, butter and cream cheese and vane' vanilla. I use coconut out of a bag, but I put on the chopping board and chop it fine so it is fluffy when sprinkled on the frosting
Everyone loves this cake. I am always asked to for it.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

7. I often make chocolate cake using the recipe

from the back of the Hershey's cocoa box. It's never fail.

I frost with a simple butter cream frosting.

True story: some years back, when we were celebrating my mother's 80th birthday, my sister asked me to make a couple of my chocolate cakes. Had you been there, you'd have had the choice of chocolate cake with chocolate frosting, chocolate cake with white frosting, or the mock napolean pastry she made.

Some background. I long ago figured out that cakes made from commercial mixes had a distinctly chemical taste and stopped using them. One year, when I'd volunteered to bake for one of the class parties for my son's class, I was VERY distressed to be instructed to make cupcakes using a strawberry (if I remember correctly) mix. Sigh. I'd wanted to make one of my chocolate recipes from scratch, but because of the flavor requirement, I bought a mix.

More background. My sister (where our mom's 80th was held, and I want to say many nice things about my sister because she deserves them) occasionally would tell her kids to invite the neighbor kids to a party. She'd bake a cake, organize games, and so on. What she wanted was to establish that not all parties were the birthday parties they were used to that required presents and a gift bag going home. My sister was (and still is) wonderful. She'd always bake a cake for these parties. She always used a cake mix.

Fast forward now to Mom's 80th. As I said before, had you been there, you'd have had the choice of chocolate cake with chocolate frosting, chocolate cake with white frosting, or the mock napolean thing. To my sister's astonishment, every single person who took a piece of cake ate the entire piece. She was used to people (even kids with their notorious sweet tooths) eating only some of the cake and casting the rest aside. Not this time. Real cake made from flour, sugar, eggs, shortening, and vanilla (real vanilla, not the artificial crap) is delicious. And worth eating.

Several years ago I had a job where on Fridays I'd bake something and bring it in to share with my coworkers. It was strange and almost embarrassing to what extent they LOVED my baked goods. And how obvious it was that most of them had never had a cookie or a cake not made from a mix.

Oh, and I long ago (as in more than 30 years ago) gave up on making layer cakes. All of my cakes are sheet cakes. No fail, trust me.

[Nay]

8. I've always liked to bake, but stopped because I became diabetic and it became

a torture to make and then not eat much of it. BUT I still enjoy baking for my grandson's school festivities, etc. One of the yearly parties is one to celebrate everyone's heritage -- dozens of people cook and bake like fiends in order to bring their country's best delicacies to this event.

Being Canadian, I decided one year to bake Nanaimo bars for the event. It was baked entirely from scratch. The taste was -- amazing.

As people came up to my table and ate their piece, it was as if they were transformed! You could tell that they really had rarely tasted a truly homemade baked good. There were guys practically having orgasms right in front of me ("Good God! What is this?? It's the best thing I've ever eaten! Jesus!" etc.). It was pretty funny. And sad, at the same time. Because this deterioration of the quality of all foods, not just baked goods, is an ongoing food problem in this country. For a couple of generations the taste buds of kids growing up eating mainly artificially colored/flavored corporation-produced foods have been warped to the point that most don't even like vegetables, fruits, meatloaf, etc., that are not pumped up with artificial materials.

I think baked goods are perhaps the easiest food in which to detect true flavor, only because sweets are almost universally loved and everyone will take a piece and can notice that there's something different. Other foods, not so much. I also make a wonderful mac 'n' cheese, but most kids won't eat it -- it's not Kraft. They are not used to the flavor of unmanipulated foods.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

9. Even bakeries for the most part are using

mixes for their cakes. It's sad.

[Nay]

10. And it's noticeable, isn't it? One thing about becoming diabetic: if I decide to

allow myself a treat, I have to make it myself. Commercial baked goods, with rare exceptions, don't taste real anymore.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

12. So true. It used to be that things from bakeries

were delicious because they were made from scratch. That's almost never true any more.

And for the home baker, making cookies, brownies, or cake from scratch rather than using a mix takes almost no additional time. None of those are labor intensive.

In a recent conversation with a new friend I mentioned I make such things from scratch and she said something along the lines of simply doctoring up a mix. I said, Nope. Sugar, flour, eggs, vanilla, and so on. She was quite surprised, although she'd just had one of my chocolate chip cookies and had commented on how good they were.

[Clarity2]

19. I agree but

I made an exception at dunkin hines mixes. That is until the past year or two, they changed the formula.
The all butter mix though hasn't changed. I would never use canned icing. Honestly I was never fond
of bakery cakes, with a few exceptions. They are often on the dry side.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

20. There was a time when bakery cakes were very good,

better than those made from mixes. Certainly up until the 1970's or '80's that was true. I'm not sure when bakeries switched over to mixes, but by the mid-80's I was finding that bakery cakes were not as good as the ones I'd bake.

It's the same with certain cookies or brownies. I bake brownies, using a recipe from a 1930's The American Woman's Cookbook. I have a chocolate chip cookie recipe from the same cookbook. The recipe is old enough that apparently chocolate chips as we know them didn't yet exist, because the recipe tells you to chop up a semi-sweet bar.

I also find that those older recipes are better. I'm not sure why, but one common feature is that they'll use fussier measurements, such as a third of a cup of something. Modern recipes are all full cup, half cup, quarter cup.

[Clarity2]

21. You are so right

I had to dig deep to remember what bakery cakes were like back in the 70s as I was a kid then, but I do recall at some family showers/birthdays in the 70s/80s that bakery cakes was so much different. Then somewhere along the line - they became more like a sponge cake. I attributed it, probably mistakenly, to being more like an italian style cake. They're not as bad these days, but I actually prefer supermarket bakery cakes to a traditional bakery cake. It of course depends on the bakery.

I have compiled a family cookbook over decades, and yes, recipes are very much different. I was on a mission to get Chocolate chip cookie just like they were when my mother made them when I was a kid (carmelized). I tried numerous recipes, including the old toll house that includes water, and none of them worked. I finally figured out the formula last year which is melting down the butter and letting the sugars meld for a bit (half butter/half marg), adding the rest of ingredients, then refrigerating the dough before cooking.

I know exactly the choc chip cookie recipe you are talking about with the chopped up choc! And I have an old'ish betty crocker cookbook from the 80s that even then, the recipes are more reliable than now.

Brownies: I've made from scratch and made from boxes - I have found the from scratch recipes too sweet for me. I admit it's another boxed mix for me - I only like ghirardelli ultimate fudge brownie mix. And even no other ghirardelli mix will do except that one.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

22. All of my best recipes come from cookbooks published no later than the mid 1970s.

Which the recipes are all somewhat older than that, depending on the recipe. I have a Better Homes and Gardens Homemade Bread Cookbook with a copyright date of 1973. It has excellent recipes for yeast breads and various sweet breads, quick breads. I even made the bagel recipe it has once. I think they turned out okay, but I had actually never had a bagel in my life at that point. And this was a recipe that required boiling, which is something I don't think is ever done any more in places that make bagels. Well, I'd hope a good Jewish deli in NYC or Detroit would still do so, but probably nowhere else.

If the from scratch brownies are too sweet, see if you can find one that requires less sugar.

See if this one will work for you.

4 oz unsweetened chocolate
2/3 cup shortening
2 cups sugar
3 large or extra large eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 ¼ cups all purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
1 cup chopped nuts.

Melt chocolate and shortening in a saucepan over low heat. Remove from heat. Mix in sugar, eggs, and vanilla. Then add the flour, baking powder and salt. Last stir in the chopped nuts. Spread in a greased glass or pyrex pan and bake at 350° for thirty minutes. Do not overbake. Cool before cutting.

Notes: I use Crisco for the shortening. I will warn you away from a butter-flavored shortening or a bargain brand. I also always use real vanilla, not imitation. For nuts I use walnuts.

This is very important: If you do not like nuts in your brownies, do not waste your time with this recipe. For some reason it does not bake up properly without the nuts.

This recipe comes from my Betty Crocker Cookbook that I bought some time in the 1970s, and I suspect this specific recipe dates back at least to the 1950s and possibly much earlier. The actual recipe calls for 4 eggs, but eggs tended to be a bit smaller back then. If you use medium eggs go for four of them. I tend to buy extra-large and three of those are just right for this recipe.

[Clarity2]

23. Thank you so much!

I will definitely give it a try! Brownies without walnuts? That does not compute! *gasp* I wouldn't have it any other way.

I have a bread machine that I had intended to try making a dough for bagels. The first batch of regular bread I made just didn't work out, so it's sitting in the garage. Have always wanted to try bagels, but I live in NY, so good bagels are all around. I really couldn't tell you if they boil them still though.

I should dig around on ebay and see if I can find some cookbooks from the 50s-70s. I have so many newer cookbooks and I never use them. I mostly go to family recipes, or the food network app.

Thanks again - much appreciated!

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

24. You are welcome.

I know, brownies without walnuts? Why bother?

I had gotten a request to make those brownies without walnuts become someone at the get-together is allergic. I was happy to accommodate, but wound up very unhappy at how they turned out. If I get a similar request I'll tell them nope, that person can skip the brownies or someone else can make them. This is the only recipe I use.

[Blue_playwright]

14. Im with you on layer cakes

Mine always collapse. Flat is good!

[pandr32]

26. You just made my heart soar

Talking about the chemical taste of cake mixes--I would know one anywhere. Never in our house! Everything is made from real, high-quality ingredients. There is no contest.
Thank you for your story and a heart for you!

[sir pball]

11. Guys, a "full sheet pan" is 26x18", far cry from a "sheet cake". You'll probably need a mix.

Full-time chef here.

If you have the time and money to experiment you can definitely scale a homemaker recipe up to a full sheet pan size, but it's not a simple matter of multiplying everything by three or whatever. Baking's finicky; when you increase the size that much you'll more likely than not have to play with the ratios of ingredients, especially the leavening (sheet pans are generally thinner than cake pans so you'll need less, unless you're using an extender)...sadly you may have to buy a gigantic sack of commercial mix that's been specifically developed to work at that size, like this stuff. Sadly I don't have any recipes at work that are scaled to a sheet or I'd be happy to share!

[Blue_playwright]

15. I appreciate it

I wound up with five box mixes to make the giant cake. Doctored them with extra butter flavoring and eggs but was worried about cook time and the leavening... but it turned out very well.

It weighed nearly 10 pounds!

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

16. I would never even consider making a full sheet pan.

And I know that scaling up cake recipes can be quite tricky.

But I'll stick by my statement that commercial mixes are never as good as genuine made from real ingredients.

[sir pball]

17. Oh, mix is never as good as a real cake at all

It's just that absent the time and resources to develop a recipe, a mix is pretty much the only option at that scale.

Honestly, I find a simple, deep, secretive pleasure in yellow box cake with canned icing but your point still absolutely stands

[dem in texas]

25. Easy One-bowl Cake

Here is one of my favorite cake recipes, so easy. Makes a moist white cake with out worrying about the creaming, separation of the batter, etc. It is for a 3-layer cake, almost too much for a sheet cake in a standard pan, but can make a few cupcakes from the extra batter. This recipes has stood the test of time, I have been making it for years. It is my daughter's favorite cake, especially with the raspberry preserves between the layers.

Jeanette's Easy Buttermilk Cake

2 1/2 plus 6 Tbsp flour 3/4 cup butter
1 1/2 teaspoon baking powder 1 cup buttermilk
3/4 teaspoon baking soda 2 teaspoons vanilla
1/2 teaspoon salt 3 eggs unbeaten
1 2/3 cup sugar

Sift dry ingredients, set aside. In large mixing bowl, stir butter just to soften. Add dry ingredients, add buttermilk and vanilla. Mix till flour is dampened, beat 2 minutes at low speed, add eggs, beat 1 minute longer. Bake at 350 degrees for 35 minutes.

For better results, use 3 layer cake pans bake at 375 for 25 minutes. Ice with fluffy frosting.

Note: I put raspberry preserves between the layers and make a white cream cheese frosting. Then I cover the frosting with coconut.