A Simple Snack Cake
This quick and easy chocolate chip sheet cake is ideal for those of you who don’t have the time (or patience, or skills 🙋🏼♀️) for a multi-level or tiered cake recipe. For those of you who are looking for something simple but still delicious, low-maintenance but still guaranteed to have your guests asking for seconds. While its base of the cake is similar to my (more complicated and more prettily-decorated) Chantilly cake, today’s recipe comes together much, much faster and is iced with a simple buttercream frosting, no crumb coats or piping tips required.Let’s get to it!
What You Need
Sugar. I chose to use granulated sugar only in this cake because I wanted to give it a lighter, whiter color that would contrast nicely against the chocolate chips. Brown sugar would have darkened the cake color a bit more than I wanted (and we’re already yellowing it some with the butter, vanilla, and egg).Butter. Only one stick of butter goes into the cake, then you’ll need another two for the frosting. As with most of my recipes, I always recommend using unsalted butter and then adding the salt, that way we maintain control over the flavor.Buttermilk. This reacts with our baking soda to give the cake some lift, but more importantly it adds tenderness, moisture, and flavor to the cake. If you don’t have buttermilk, you can use my easy buttermilk substitute.Mini chocolate chips. You could substitute regular-sized semisweet chocolate chips, but personally I prefer to use the smaller chips. Since our cake layer is so thin, the mini chocolate chips lend themselves to a better, less over-whelming texture, and they just look better.
SAM’S TIP: In the photos, I make this cake with a vanilla frosting. It provides a nice contrast agains the black chocolate chips on top. However, if you’d like to do a chocolate frosting instead (which I did in the video), simply mix ½ cup of cocoa powder into the frosting. Remember, this is just an overview of the ingredients I used and why. For the full recipe please scroll down to the bottom of the post!
How to Make Chocolate Chip Sheet Cake
SAM’S TIP: The cake batter is fairly thick, this is normal and expected. I found that a thicker batter was necessary to keep the chocolate chips suspended in the cake. Enjoy! Let’s bake together! I’ll be walking you through all the steps in my written recipe and video below! If you try this recipe, be sure to tag me on Instagram, and you can also find me on YouTube and Facebook
Related Recipes
This recipe was originally published in April of 2016. I have updated the recipe to improve it and have also updated the post and photos to improve them as well, and have added a how-to video.
