25 Birthday Cakes and Cupcakes to Fulfill Every Wish

A Bundt cake or bar cookie will suffice (and be welcome!) for an everyday treat, but a birthday requires something with a bit more celebratory pizzazz. When you need to make a little fuss, work up a little fanfare, you need a showstopping cake (or cupcake!). Enter these birthday essentials, our favorites for making, celebrating and eating.

If ever there was a party in a cake, this is it. Rainbow sprinkles over the frosting and throughout the layers are a visual and textural “hooray!” for the birthday person of honor. This cake combines butter and oil—the former for flavor, and the latter for supreme tenderness.

This cake harkens back to the flavors of something you might have found on Grandma’s counter when you were growing up, just a bright vanilla cake with a rich chocolate frosting on top. A bit of corn syrup in the frosting ensures that it will remain impossibly glossy.

If you’re worried that a character cake might inspire one of your family members to nominate you for Nailed It!, trust us; you’ve got this. It looks complicated but it comes together with a few supermarket shortcuts that will transform it into a unicorn. A fun hack that renders marshmallows into a sort of fondant (and a tasty one, at that) means that everyone in the house can get in on the fun of decorating.

Has Ree got layers? And how! (That’s eight, if you count the frosting.) This cake embodies what we all dream about when it comes to chocolate cake. The cake layers are rich and dark, and the frosting is a super-decadent ganache that will also seal in the moistness of the cake.

A pull-apart cake for a celebration is a joy to behold—and to be…holding, as you won’t need any knife or even plates to grab your portion; hidden beneath the unified icing are cupcakes, not cake! It goes without saying that shaping it into a “20” is just a suggestion; of course, you can fete any birthday age by just rearranging into other numbers.

We probably don’t need to explain why it’s called the Spirograph cake, but we will say that it really lets you indulge your inner artist—or is a great way to collaborate with the artist in your family, even if they don’t like baking themselves. Edible markers provide a way of using the favorite childhood toy of artists and mathematicians alike to decorate discs of fondant. A base of buttercream looks painted with watercolors, but the technique for getting it that way is simple even if you haven’t mastered the Masters. Watch the video to get the idea!

Thinking of presenting a beloved about-to-turn-1-year-old with a smash cake? Kardea’s got you covered! (For the uninitiated, a smash cake celebrates a baby’s birthday by giving him his own fully-assembled tiny cake that he can eat as he pleases, meaning, fingers and toes in, or face-first.) This recipe provides instructions and ingredients for one little 6-inch cake for Baby and one 8-inch cake for partygoers—whether they eat with a fork or via smashing is up to them.

Need a treat for the ballerina in your life? Molly Yeh brings tutu vibes with a sophisticated cake flavored with almond and frosted with a combo of raspberry and blueberry-infused buttercream. It’s sure to be the star at the birthday barre.

Why do brides and grooms have all the fun with their fancy tiered cakes? As Ina knows, just change the color and it’s a seriously festive option for a birthday crowd. No worries about fussing with dowels—this cake is sturdy enough to support the weight of the tiers without any additional scaffolding.

Don’t underestimate the power of a sheet cake for a special occasion—it can easily feed a crowd but it also heightens the chance of leftovers, which--who doesn’t love that? This one has almond-scented layers and a frosting of creamy milk chocolate.

Everything about this cake is unexpected. Angel cake usually trades on its snowy whiteness, but this one explodes with color. A golden meringue topping is usually found on pies, but here it lends its toasted-marshmallow flavor to the cake and seals the surprise of the speckled cake inside.

We love the cracked, sort of toasted-marshmallowy exterior of an angel food cake, so baking it into cupcake liners rather than a traditional pan is a genius move (more exteriors to love!). A little cream cheese frosting provides the perfect rich counterpoint to the light cakes and provides a snowy base to really pop the rainbow sprinkles.

This fudgy cake goes above and beyond the requirements for a classic German chocolate cake. Present are the nonnegotiable coconut filling and milk-chocolate cake layers, but a band of rich chocolate ganache around the exterior wall makes this version a best-in-class.

We won’t lie: This stunner of a cake, inspired by the work of the Russian bakery Kalabasa, is a serious project. And yet: The step-by-step instructions (and accompanying video!) will hold your hand to get you to showstopping results. If you have a Cupcake Wars-obsessed teen who is ready to move on from experimentation with fondant, hand over this recipe and prepare to be wowed. Not incidentally, the flavors, a buttery cake brightened with lemon curd and buttercream, are as sophisticated as the cake looks.

This showstopper from Kardea Brown goes all-in with coconut, using coconut oil and cream of coconut in the layers and extract in the frosting, not to mention toasted coconut on top, the toasting an added step that is so worth it. Anyone who loves tropical flavors will go coconuts over this one.

You can absolutely substitute vanilla extract in these cupcakes, as written in the recipe, but going with vanilla paste, if you can find it, will really make for a remarkable flavor. As with our favorite chocolate cupcakes, we’ve designed these to go with any kind of frosting, but here we pump up the vanilla theme with some simple vanilla buttercream (again, if you have the vanilla paste, you won’t regret using it).

This cake has that dense-crumbed interior that you expect from a pound cake, but it’s made in a Bundt pan, so it’s double your pleasure! The deep chocolatiness works practically any time of day, whether a low-key birthday dessert, an afternoon snack, or heck, we won’t judge if you want a slice with coffee for breakfast.

When is a cake not a cake? When it’s a marshmallow! Prepare for some serious smiles when the slice of a knife reveals that this confection is actually made from layered marshmallow. It’s perfect for capping off any candy-lover’s celebration, and you might be tempted to lightly broil a slice of the leftovers, just saying.

Cupcakes become even more friendly for the hand-held experience by being baked right into ice cream cones! A little swirl of store-bought buttercream and a chocolate fudge topping will have party guests completely fooled about what’s inside, and that’s just the cherry on top.

Slice into this cake for an excellent surprise—a psychedelic rainbow swirled inside. The multicolored batters (don’t worry, it’s just one batter split into five) are piped into the cake pans and marbleized with a skewer for a truly groovy look.

We reach for this cupcake recipe when we want a solid go-to that will be just right every time. With a little coffee to bring out its chocolatiness and some buttermilk for tang, the cake works well with virtually any kind of frosting you would want to pair it with. Here, we’ve topped the little cakes with a straightforward but equally delicious chocolate buttercream.

When you see that birthday on the calendar but know that the days leading up to it will be cray, this kit will be your savior. Baked and with frosting made in advance, the whole can sit in the freezer until the day rolls around. It defrosts while you pull yourself together, and then assembles in a flash.

To eliminate confusion: it’s not strawberry shortcake, that combination of sweet biscuits topped with macerated strawberries and whipped cream—but it does embody that spirit in a cake, thus, Strawberry Shortcake Cake. The cake layers are toasty and biscuity, and the cream cheese frosting really complements the flavor of the fresh fruit.

When you want a truly Dr. Seussian, eye-poppingly red cake, look no further. The cake itself is exactly that gentle chocolate/sweet flavor that you expect from red velvet, with a complementary cream cheese frosting whose whiteness really emphasizes the cartoonish contrast.