Pumpkin cake recipe

This pumpkin cake is easy to make, soft, super moist, and topped with an easy homemade cream cheese frosting. The perfect dessert for fall!
The weather has started to cool off and I’ve been patiently waiting to share some apple and pumpkin recipes with you! The first pumpkin recipe I had to share was this simple pumpkin cake.
While I love making cakes and decorating them, there’s also something I love about the simplicity of this cake. All you have to do is whisk together your dry ingredients, then the wet ingredients, combine them, pour the batter into a pan, and bake it.
Another great thing about making cakes in a 9×13 pan is that you don’t really have to worry about decorating them. All you have to do is mix up your favorite frosting (I used a cream cheese frosting on this one!) and spread it on top. It doesn’t get much easier than that, does it?
To make this cake you’ll start out with your dry ingredients: some all-purpose flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, and spices. For the spices in this cake I used ground cinnamon and to keep things simple I also used pumpkin pie spice.
Now, I know pumpkin pie spice isn’t available everywhere but I do have a recipe for it here on my site. It’s super simple to make your own and that recipe makes close to 1/3 cup. You can easily cut that recipe in half if you need to though.
For the wet ingredients, you’ll be using some pumpkin puree, oil, brown sugar, granulated sugar, eggs, and vanilla extract. I used an entire can of pumpkin in this recipe to make it even easier, but it also adds moisture to the cake along with the oil.
Then, just combine the dry ingredients with the wet ingredients, pour it into a 9×13 pan, and bake it.
For the frosting on this cake, I used my favorite cream cheese frosting recipe because it pairs so well with pumpkin. The frosting is just a simple mixture of cream cheese, butter, powdered sugar, and vanilla extract. You could even add 1/2 teaspoon of ground cinnamon for a cinnamon cream cheese frosting on this cake.
If you want to try a buttercream frosting, I have vanilla, chocolate, and caramel frosting recipes in my post on how to make buttercream that would work great on this cake too!