84 summer cake recipes

Fresh tart cherry pie with a flaky double crust and just five ingredients. Summer baking at its most honest, no canned filling required.

Cherry jam simmers pitted sweet cherries with sugar into a thick, glossy preserve in just two ingredients. A classic small-batch summer canning project, no commercial pectin needed.

Granny's boiled fruit cake: an old-fashioned eggless, butterless loaf made by simmering raisins with sugar and shortening, then folding into spiced flour. Plump, moist and Christmas-ready.

Dense, buttery pound cake infused with apple cider and warming fall spices gets drizzled with a simmered buttermilk glaze. This autumn dessert feeds a crowd and slices beautifully for gatherings.

This is another very normal dish that Korean people eat all the time, here the rice cake is nothing to do with dessert, it's a plain small patty or stick that is made of rice, normally simmered with stock, Korean chili sauce, cabbage and chilies. It soak all the delicious flavor, a classic and tasty Korean dish.

Quick sweet pickles for canning, eight pounds of cucumbers in a sugar-vinegar brine spiced with allspice, celery seed, and mustard seed. A big-batch summer canning project.

Quick fresh-pack dill pickles canned in pint jars with mustard seed, dill heads, and a hot vinegar brine. The classic American summer canning project, no fermenting required.

Fresh berry crumb pie with a toasted hazelnut crumb crust serving double duty as topping, filled with juicy mixed berries and lightly thickened with cornstarch. Summer baking that tastes like a streusel, a pie, and a cobbler all at once.

Red and black raspberry pudding cake with fresh and frozen berries simmered into syrup and spooned over a buttery cake batter. The berries sink while baking, creating a soft pudding-cake top.

Sugarless cake leans on simmered raisins for natural sweetness instead of refined sugar, with oats, cinnamon, and a touch of artificial sweetener. Diabetic-friendly snack cake that still tastes like dessert.

Choco date cake folds simmered medjool-style dates, oats, and semisweet chocolate chips into a buttery sheet cake. Caramelized date sweetness with melty pockets of chocolate, baked in a 13x9 and topped with whipped cream.

Simple walnut raisin cake with brown sugar and warm spices, simmered then baked low and slow for moist tender squares ready in an hour.

Renaissance pizza layers a slow-simmered carrot-onion tomato sauce with sauteed broccoli, cauliflower, and mushrooms on a rectangular cake-flour crust. Fully vegetarian.

Rich boiled fruit cake with currants, raisins, and sultanas simmered in sugar water with mixed spice and ginger before baking. A dense, moist British classic.

Spice cake made with amber ale, mixed dried fruit, brown sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg, and cloves. The fruit simmers in beer before baking for a dense, malty, pub-inspired dessert.

Chocolate raisin snacking cake with cocoa, cinnamon, and chopped nuts, made in one saucepan. Raisins get simmered first to plump them up, and the warm cooking liquid goes right into the batter.