You know those times when you can’t really decide what kind of dessert you want? Cake, pudding, custard…it all sounds good! Thankfully, we came up with this dish so you don’t have to choose – you’re welcome! Lemon lava cake is a dessert that feeds a crowd, plus, satiates just about every facet of your sweet tooth, be it the craving for cake or warm lemon pudding; it all comes together in a lave-esque explosion of flavor that we’re absolutely hooked on.

So, let’s dive in. We used box mix yellow cake, that we spruced up a bit, and lemon pudding mix, which we also zhoosh-ed up, and it comes together in a snap. While you can definitely make a yellow cake (or lemon cake) from scratch, or make a lemon pudding on the stovetop, when we want to make this, we usually want it in a hurry, so we cut a couple corners, then add in a couple extra ingredients and find we love the result every time and never really find ourselves wishing we’d done the whole thing from scratch.

In order to take the store-bought cake and pudding mix up a notch, we add lemon extract, vanilla extract and lemon zest. They might not seem like star ingredients on their own, but they add the perfect amount of flavor, so you’ve got a zest-filled lemon pudding and a lemon vanilla cake to soak it all up and round out the dessert. Whether you attempt to serve this as slices (topped with ice cream, duh) or just as a big ol’ scoopful – with lemon lava erupting from it nonetheless – this is a great summer dessert that we could tuck into any time.