Pork & beans. In a cake. In a can. Weird, right? And yet, this recipe has been around for a long time. There must be something to it! One brave YouTuber, Emmy, tried out the recipe for herself, so we didn’t have to. Here’s her process as well as her official taste-taste and thoughts about the cake.
The recipe starts out like any other spice cake. Mix your wet ingredients – oil, sugar, and eggs, in a large bowl. Then, mix your dry ingredients together – flour, cinnamon, baking soda, etc. Pour the dry ingredients into the wet ingredients to form a soft batter.
Pretty typical, right? Here’s where things take a turn. Once all of the lumps are out of your batter, pour in 15oz of canned pork & beans. Typically, the pork & beans come in 11.5oz cans, so you’ll end up using a little less than 1 1/2 cans. You can either fold the beans in if you want to be able to see them in the baked cake, or you can beat the batter with a hand mixer to fully incorporate it.
Next, pour your batter into a cake pan or directly into the used pork & beans cans for a fun serving idea. If you’re using the cans to bake some of the batter, make sure to only fill them about 1/2 way, as the cake rises quite a bit. After baking and cooling, go ahead and put the label back on the can to get the complete experience.
So, what does pork & beans cake in a can taste like?! Surprisingly, it tastes like a delicious, sweet, and moist spice cake. There’s no hint of bean flavor or texture, nor is there any trace of canned pork. Emmy explains that the canned pork & beans are actually quite sweet since it’s loaded with brown sugar and molasses. While you can’t taste the pork, the sodium makes the cake more savory.
Everything actually works well together, and unless someone told you about the secret ingredient, you’d be none the wiser! Don’t believe it? Try this recipe yourself!