5 Easy Cake Recipes for Busy Weeknights - Ready in Under 30 Minutes
Written by jheelum basu | October 25, 2025
A sudden impromptu party mood in the middle of an exhausting work week? Friends are coming over, and you have no time to jump into those elaborate cake recipes? Well, don’t worry. We have got your back with some quick recipes using basic ingredients for your dessert-loving friends without spending hours in the kitchen.
To share the true essence of joy and togetherness through desserts, one doesn’t always need to get into a complex culinary extravaganza. If you are running out of time, following these recipes, you can quickly create truly exquisite yet easy cake recipes with the items lying around your kitchen.
Be it a one-bowl chocolate cake or a chocolate cookie cake, you can now say hello to endless easy cake recipes. To surprise your guests with thosevisually appealing and lip-smacking desserts, you simply need to elevate your dessert game. And we will show you how. Let’s get started with the absolute showstopper desserts for your house party!.
5 Easy Cake Recipes for Busy Weeknights
1. One Bowl Chocolate Cake
When time is an issue, this homemade one-bowl chocolate cake is an ultimate savior as it is super easy to prepare. All it takes is just one big mixing bowl for a delicious, tender, moist, and fluffy chocolate cake, which you can frost with your favorite buttercream frosting.
Using the standard cake ingredients (flour, sugar, baking soda, salt, chocolate, butter, and eggs), you can whip up the batter for this melt-in-your-mouth chocolate cake. While store-bought cake mixes can be used as well, nothing tastes like the homemade delight made from scratch with love for your near and dear ones.
Once the batter is ready, bake it in a preheated oven for 25-30 minutes. Then take it out of the oven, let it cool, and garnish it with some buttercream frosting before your friends ring the doorbell.
2. Chocolate Sheet Cake
Being one of the simplest cake recipes, a chocolate sheet cake is a moist, thin, one-layer chocolate cake baked in a large, rectangular sheet pan. All you need is to follow the standard chocolate cake-baking process using your pantry staples like flour, sugar, baking soda, salt, chocolate, butter, and eggs. Prepare the batter and bake it for 25-30 minutes. Once the cake adjusts to the room temperature, garnishing can be done using a rich chocolate frosting, dry fruits, and nuts like pecans, almonds, walnuts, and hazelnuts.
3. Simple Coffee Cake
While the name often means that a coffee cake must contain coffee as an ingredient, it is not always true. Whether you want to add coffee to your cake or not is entirely subjective. The true meaning of a coffee cake is a cake that is intended to be eaten with coffee.
Typically, a coffee cake is a sweet, single-layer cake with regional variations. However, the butter base and the crumbly streusel topping remain constant across all variations. The crumbly streusel topping is made by combining sugar, flour, and cinnamon.
To prepare this moist, sweet, simple coffee cake for your friends to have with evening coffee, start by making the cake batter with all-purpose flour, eggs, sour cream, vanilla extract, baking soda, sugar, salt, and softened butter. Pour it into a cake tin and top it with the streusel topping, and allow it to bake for 25-30 minutes. Once it is out of the oven, allow it to cool properly before slicing.
4. Chocolate Chip Cookie Cake
Being unapologetically indulgent in nature, the chocolate chip cookie adds a soft-in-the-center and chewy-on-the-edges kind of texture to the chocolate chip cookie cake. Moreover, this fun-filled dessert can be assembled very quickly. No cookie dough refrigeration or dough shaping is needed, as the cookie dough is baked in the cake pan. An abundance of chocolate chips and visually appealing decoration with chocolate buttercream make this recipe a must-try for everyone.
You can assemble the cookie dough quickly using an electric mixer. It is recommended to start by creaming the butter and brown sugar, then add the remaining wet ingredients (eggs, vanilla extract). Next, whisk the dry ingredients (flour, cornstarch, baking soda, salt) together, then add them to the wet ingredients and mix to combine. Finally, add the chocolate chips on top of the cookie dough and bake it for 25 minutes. Once it is out of the oven, you may decorate it with some luscious chocolate buttercream and sprinklers.
5. Peanut Butter Chocolate Lava Cakes
Who doesn’t like the camaraderie of sweet and salty tastes in one dessert? Homemade peanut butter chocolate lava cakes are the ultimate examples of sweet and salty at the same time. Except for the peanut butter filling, the other ingredients are similar to those of any chocolate lava cake. While the fresh-from-the-oven, fudgy, warm chocolate cake is filled with melty peanut butter, it is often topped with vanilla ice cream, which makes it unbelievably indulgent in nature.