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.