My First Dump Cake

I've eaten dump cakes before, and I've seen recipes for a variety of dump cakes. But until today, I'd never actually made one. The premise of a dump cake is that you just dump a can or two of fruit into the pan, dump some dry cake mix on top, sprinkle it with bits of butter and bake the thing until it's done. You don't even have to dirty a bowl. I really have no excuse for not ever making one before, considering how easy it is, except that we rarely buy cake mix. This week, however, cake mix was on sale at Wally-World, so we caved in and bought a couple boxes. And I'm so glad we did!

This recipe is based on one from Southern Plate's cookbook (which is an absolute treasure trove of real, delicious Southern recipes! You can buy it on her blog). Christy's recipe calls for cherries, but I substituted some canned peaches. I also omitted the nuts that Christy calls for. They would be delicious in this cake, but I didn't happen to have any that I could use tonight.

Dump Cake
1 can crushed pineapple, undrained
About 1 1/2 cup chopped canned peaches, mostly drained but still a bit drippy (don't you love my technical vocab)
1 box yellow cake mix
1 cube butter or margarine

Grease baking pan (I used a 9x13). Dump in the pineapple and then the peaches. Sprinkle cake mix on top. Cut butter into patties and put on top. Bake at 350 for 50 to 55 minutes (I was skeptical about the time to cook, usually a 9x13 cake bakes in almost half that time, but this really is how long it's supposed to bake). Serve warm.


This smelled wonderful while it was baking, and it tasted great, with the warm fruit on the bottom, and the sweet and buttery crisp cake on top. It would have been absolutely fabulous with some ice cream melting on top, but it was great without it as well. When I took my first piece, I wanted it to look nice for the pictures. Well, as nice as something can look considering that it's called "dump." But by my second helping, I didn't care what it looked like, I just wanted to get it onto my plate and start eating it! So it ended up looking like this. You know, I almost think it looks tastier this way.


An added bonus: This recipe is easy enough for kids to help, which leads to family fun in the kitchen!