Root Beer Is The Unexpected Ingredient For Festive Summer Cakes

When making summer cakes, try adding summery ingredients. Take for example our snow cone summer cake pops recipe where we use lemon cake mix and red, white, and blue sanding sugar. Another unexpected ingredient for festive summer cakes is a fizzy and refreshing one: root beer. 

Thanks to the carbonation and sugars in soda, the addition makes cakes come out of the oven extra fluffy and moist. Plus, when you add root beer to the batter or mix, it will impart the lovely and unique flavors of root beer into the cake. 

Ready to incorporate root beer into your cool summer cakes? First, choose a root beer (we recommend picking one from the 19 best root beer brands we've ranked for you, with Saranac Brewery's root beer topping the list). Then, you can simply mix a standard, 12-ounce can of root beer with a box of vanilla or chocolate cake mix and bake it into a moist and fluffy cake. Alternatively, you can try our easy and delicious root beer float cupcake recipe, developed by Michelle McGlinn, where you'll incorporate root beer into the cake batter and root beer concentrate into the frosting without subtracting any ingredients. To make 12 of our cupcakes, use 1/2 cup of root beer for the cake batter and 2 teaspoons of root beer concentrate for the frosting. When adding root beer to cake recipes that don't already include root beer, be sure to subtract an equal amount of another wet ingredient, such as milk.

If you wish to make a dessert other than cupcakes, consider tres leches cake, a delicious and popular Latin American cake that originated in Nicaragua. You can add root beer directly into the tres leches cake batter. Additionally, you can replace one of the three milks with root beer to add sweetness and flavor. Topped with whipped cream, the dessert becomes a lovely root beer float tres leches. An easy recipe to add root beer to make this delicious tres leches cake variation is our easy tres leches cake recipe. Simply replace the milk in the cake batter and the sweetened condensed milk in the milk layer with an equal amount of root beer.

We had mentioned earlier that you can add root beer concentrate to make root beer-flavored frosting. Additionally, you can make root beer-flavored icing for summer sugar cookies. Mix root beer concentrate with confectioners' sugar to make the easy root beer flavored icing. Finally, root beer or root beer concentrate can be added to cheesecake batter and pie batter to make other fun and festive summer desserts.