The Unusual Techniques That Make This “Forgotten” Retro Cake Tender, Easy, and Delicious

Every Sunday, I bake a cake to eat throughout the week. It lives on our kitchen counter, ready for me, my family, and unexpected guests to nibble on. Usually, the baked good is a snacking cake like banana bread or coffee cake. Lately, however, I’ve been whipping up a lazy daisy cake, which consists of a sponge cake topped with a mixture of melted butter, brown sugar, and sweetened shredded coconut.

The lazy daisy cake is a retro dessert that dates back to the 1930s. I first came across it several years ago in the 1942 General Mills book Betty Crocker Cook Book of All-Purpose Baking, where it was titled “Busy-Day Cake.” The book notes that it is also “sometimes called Lazy Daisy Cake or Emergency Cake,” which made me chuckle.

Betty Crocker’s version calls for sifting flour, sugar, salt, and baking powder into a bowl, then beating in shortening, milk, egg, and “flavoring.” After the cake is baked, the recipe instructs readers to top it with a “broiled icing” of melted butter, brown sugar, cream, and chopped nuts or shredded coconut. Curious to find out more about this cake, I poked around the internet and dove into old issues of various newspapers, and I learned that the cake was fairly popular in the 1930s and 1940s. Unlike the version in the Betty Crocker book, which was made by creaming butter and sugar, many lazy daisy cake recipes used a hot milk cake as the base, which is made by pouring hot milk and melted butter into whipping eggs.

In the January 9, 1939 edition of The Tulsa Tribune, the writer Betty Sneed called the cake one of her favorites. “On days when there’s no dessert in the house and you haven’t much time, this recipe will fill in just dandy because it can be mixed up in only a few minutes,” she notes, adding that there’s no need to worry about creaming ingredients and no waiting for the cake to cool before icing it. “If you haven’t already formed the lazy daisy habit on lazy days, here’s your chance.” Sneed’s rendition of the cake uses a hot milk cake as its base and calls for serving the cake immediately after spreading the coconut icing on—no broiling required.

As is the case with many beloved recipes, there are many riffs on lazy daisy cake. Some people make the sponge by creaming the butter and sugar together before adding the eggs and dry ingredients, and some people dump all the cake ingredients into a bowl and whisk until a batter forms. The most common version of the cake, however, is a hot milk cake that’s slathered with the coconut mixture once it’s baked, then broiled until the topping is golden brown. It’s remarkably similar to the popular Danish drømmekage (“dream cake” in Danish). It’s unclear whether the two are related, but I’d wager that they are. 

In my recipe below, I use a hot milk cake as the base. It’s extremely simple to make and almost impossible to mess up: To make it, you simply whisk whole eggs with sugar until they’re pale, fluffy, and doubled in volume, then pour in a mixture of hot milk and butter, and finally add the dry ingredients and mix until you have a cohesive batter.

It wouldn’t be a lazy daisy cake without the coconut topping, so I’ve of course included that in my recipe, with the slight twist of browning the butter before whisking in brown sugar, milk, and salt, followed by the sweetened shredded coconut. The brown butter gives the topping rich, nutty notes that complement the molasses flavor of the brown sugar, and a little salt helps round it out.

Many traditional lazy daisy cakes call for baking the cake, then topping and broiling it. In my testing, however, I found that baking the topping was a more reliable method than broiling, and resulted in a crisp coconut crust that was evenly browned—not scorched—each time. So, instead of dolloping the coconut mixture onto the cake at the very end, I carefully spread it on the cake halfway through baking. As the cake continues to cook, the coconut caramelizes, becoming satisfyingly crisp and chewy. 

It’s a marvelously easy cake that takes just 10 minutes of active time to prep. The cake is nicely moist and can be kept in an airtight container for up to five days—but if your neighbors, friends, and family love it as much as mine do, something tells me the cake will be gone in just a few hours.

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