Ugly Sweater Cake

This Ugly Sweater Cake recipe makes it easy to create a tacky Christmas dessert with all the bright colors and cheerful designs you’d find on a cloth version but in food form. Using a boxed cake mix combined with 4 simple pantry staples, plus frosting and holiday garnishes, it’s so much fun to design a dessert with crazy cute details that tastes delicious!

Simple and Sweet Ugly Sweater Cake – Super cute for Christmas dessert

It’s sweater season and time to bake an Ugly Sweater Cake! Whether you are dressing for a contest, a parade, or a party, it’s always fun to bring ugly fashion to your food. This trend, once considered a joke, is now one of Christmas’s most popular traditions–that’s why we made it so easy to bake this cake so you too can partake in the spirit of the season.

You literally combine a box of cake mix with a few ingredients, frost it, and add a bunch of candy decorations to create the perfect pastry for this special occasion.

Forget the boring store-bought Ugly Sweater Cake and make your own version full of embarrassing embellishments, pretty-ugly patterns, buttons, and little lights, because this year’s “outfit” is edible!

No matter how you slice it, this recipe takes the cake (ok, that was corny!) for the cutest, tackiest, showiest Ugly Sweat Cake that is fun to share with friends and family.

Why We Love This Ugly Sweater Cake Recipe

• Easy to make with a box of cake mix and simple ingredients.
• Deliciously adorable sweet treat.
• Trending and traditional ugly fashion in food-form.
• Fun to decorate with your entire family.
• Perfect to serve for holiday parties or on Ugly Christmas Sweater Day (yes, that’s a thing!).
• Simple to customize with creative combinations and designs.

Ingredients / Shopping List

• White cake mix: You can substitute a yellow or vanilla or even a chocolate cake mix if you prefer.
• Nutmeg: You can substitute cinnamon or omit this ingredient if you aren’t a fan of nutmeg.
• Orange juice: You can substitute water or milk.
• Eggs
• Salted butter (melted): Vegetable oil can be substituted if necessary.
• Whipped white frosting tubs: You can substitute vanilla or cream cheese frosting.
• Red food coloring
• Green food coloring 
• Twizzlers pull’n’peel strips: You can use red icing instead if you prefer.
• Mike and Ike candies
• Mini pretzel stick
• Christmas sprinkles
• Mini candy cane candies 
• Mini marshmallows
• Orange and brown jimmies: You can substitute icing or omit these though your snowmen won’t be quite as cute. 
• Mini pretzels
• Biscoff cookie: You can substitute a round, brown cookie or cracker if necessary.
• Blue mini M&Ms
• Red and brown peanut butter M&Ms (1 red, 4 brown): You can change up the colors or use another type of M&M if you prefer.

Substitutions and Additions

• Change the Cake Flavors: You can combine any cake, spice, and juice flavoring that you’d like. For example, try a chocolate cake with cranberry juice or a yellow cake with cinnamon and apple cider.
• Flavor Your Frosting: Use some almond or maple extract or some lemon or orange zest to add a bit of zing without changing the color of the frosting.
• Change The Frosting Colors: Even though we tend to think of red and green as the standard “Christmas colors”, there is no reason why you can’t make an orange and purple ugly sweater cake! Pick your favorite colors and see how it turns out!
• Customize Your Cake Colors and Candies: Get creative with your personal favorite candy and colors. There is no reason that you have to stick with regular Mike and Ike candies for the Christmas lights. You can use their other flavors or even change it up with M&Ms of any color. Feel free to use any round candy for the sweater buttons and decorate your reindeer with any round candy or sprinkles you have on hand.
• Style Your Own Sweater: This recipe is just a guideline to get you started. Get the whole family involved and make a patchwork sweater to show off everyone’s creativity!

Recommended Tools

• 9×13 inch baking pan
• Mixing bowls and tools
• Measuring tools
• Cake or cutting board
• Piping bags and tips
• Offset spatula or butter knife

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How to Make an Ugly Sweater Cake

This Ugly Sweater Cake recipe makes it easy to create a tacky Christmas treat with bright colors and cheerful designs using a boxed cake mix combined with 4 simple pantry staples (plus candy decorations). Simply follow these step-by-step instructions to design a dessert with crazy cute details that tastes delicious!

Bake the cake:

1. Whisk together the cake mix and nutmeg.
2. Add orange juice, eggs, and butter and beat until smooth.
   
3. Pour batter into baking pan and bake at 350 degrees Fahrenheit for 23-28 minutes.
   
4. When cake has cooled, place a board on top of the pan and invert it to turn out the cake.

To Decorate the Cake:

1. Mix together frosting and red food coloring until you reach a deep, Christmas red color.
2. In a separate bowl, mix together frosting and green food coloring.
3. Frost on a “V neck” with white frosting onto the middle of the top of the short side of the cake. Then, vertically frost half of the rest of the cake, with red frosting and the other half with green frosting.
4. To make the button up seam, pipe white frosting to outline the V-neck and down the middle of the cake. On the red half of the sweater, pipe 2 lines to separate the red side into 4 even spaces.
   Pro Tip: Use a piping bag with a star tip for this step.
   
5. Loop pull’n’peel strips across the green half of the cake to make a “string of lights”.
6. Place Mike and Ike candies along the string to create “lights”. 
   
7. Place the pretzel stick on the top third of the red side of the cake. Pipe green frosting onto the pretzel stick to make a tree. Make a longer strip on the bottom and make each strip shorter as you move up towards the top of the tree.
   Pro Tip: Use a piping bag with a small, round tip for this step.
8. Decorate the Christmas Tree with sprinkles.
   
9. In the next section of the red side, add mini candy cane decorations or fill with sprinkles.
10. Make two snowmen using mini marshmallows in the next section of the red side. Use white frosting to hold an orange jimmie as a nose and two brown jimmies as arms on each snowman. Decorate with Christmas sprinkles, optional.
    
11. On the portion of the red half of the cake, place the two mini pretzels with the half of the Biscoff cookie on top to make a reindeer. Use white frosting to attach two mini M&Ms as eyes and red peanut butter M&M as a nose.
     
12. Make buttons down the front of the sweater with brown peanut butter M&Ms.
    Pro Tip: Buttons should be placed on top of the white strip that you piped on in step 4.
13. Decorate with additional sprinkles, optional, and enjoy eating your ugly sweater!
    

Storage Tips

• To Store: Once frosted and decorated, this Christmas cake can be stored at room temperature, uncovered, for up to 1 week. Once you cut it, it should be stored covered.
• To Freeze: This cake can be frozen in a freezer-safe container for up to 6 months but the candies may not keep their color and consistency after thawing. 

Frequently Asked Questions

Other Easy Christmas Recipes

• Reindeer Pretzel Rods
• Grinch Punch
• DIY Peppermint Candy Bowls
• Christmas Red Velvet Poke Cake
• Gingerbread Kiss Cookies
• Christmas Tree Brownie Cups
• Cinnamon Ornaments
• Grinch Rice Krispie Treats