Dump Cake

The way my mom made this dessert back in the late 60s in New Orleans tasted lovely, and was not too sweet. The name "dump cake" hadn't yet come into being; she and her friends called it a cobbler. Into an 8- or 9-inch square pan: 2 cans of water-packed, pitted sour cherries (liquid included); sprinkle a box of butter pecan cake mix evenly over the fruit; evenly spoon .25 pound of melted salted butter over the cake mix; and bake until brown. It should be nicely crisp. Serve with ice cream.

My mother made this all the time growing up. We loved it. She used cherry pie filling (no pineapple) plus slivered almonds (a must). I now make this, but I buy frozen cherries and make my own filling. It’s way better. It seems most cans of cherry pie filling are short on the cherries and heavy on the gloop.

Yes! Just dump the dry mix on top of the pie filling. The way I always make this is minus the pineapple, just cherry pie filling. I also just thinly slice the butter rather than melt it and just add the thin pats of butter all around on top of the cake mix. That's how I learned how to make it. It's really yummy!

From Girl Scout camp I know that you can bake this in a coffee can over a fire.

My DIL loves peach, so I devised a peach dumpcake, replacing the cherry pie filling with the larger can of peaches which I partially drain. Other than that, I follow this recipe as usual. It makes a really nice peach pie alternative. I typically add cardamom to my peach recipes. It's a nice change of pace.

Just a minute, I need to know if I understood this. I should dump the dry cake mix on top of the fruit?

Instead of melting butter I used a potato peeler to slice of strips of butter for the top. Easy to make sure it was distributed evenly.

This is very similar to a family recipe for blueberry dump cake. The difference: use fresh or frozen blueberries on the bottom, then one small can of crushed pineapple on top, then the cake mix spread across the top, then a few crushed pecans – all before pouring the melted butter over it all. It is so good!

I bet you boys had a lot of fun with the name & thought your Mom called it that just for you. 😊 What a sweet Mom not to tell you that & spoil your fun. You missed her twinkling eyes & small grin, because you were so busy wolfing down the grunt (between grunting noises). Now that you're big I can tell you that a "grunt" is the New England name for a cobbler-like dessert of fruit baked under soft biscuits - from the fruit making soft animal-like grunts as it boiled & popped under the crust.

Also - USE PECANS! i have a family member who has nut allergy so I leave about 1/4 of the 9X13 pan nut free. Otherwise, I put lots of pecan peaces on the rest. Adds a lot. This is a deceptively good pie/cake/cobbler.

I’ve stirred the cake in for a similar recipe before after reading this technique in other recipes. It was a disaster. Half of the cake is never cooked properly. I’d adhere to the instructions of not mixing, especially since others on this chain have success with the recipe as written or handed down through generations.

My family makes this with a devils’s food cake mix, and I’ve riffed further with spice cake mix atop apple pie filling. Delicious with ice cream.

Note: bake in a glass or ceramic pan, NOT aluminum. If you keep it for more than a couple days, the acid from the pineapple will start eating through the aluminum. My family's recipe included coconut and chopped pecans. Wverything else is the same. Delish!

Don’t let the simplicity of this recipe fool you. Sure, it’s mindless, takes zero skill and the ingredients are trash, but it’s surprisingly great and kids LOVE it. As a child I used to ask my mom to make this for me four decades ago and it still tastes exactly like I remember it. Only back then we called it junk cake.

My mother used to make her dump cake in an tube pan and added pecans to the topping. Quite decadent! OTOH, another relative didn’t quite get the concept of do not stir. They mixed everything before baking, and the result was not as tasty.