Ruby Slipper Cake is a simple, nostalgic bundt cake with a beautiful red ribbon running through its center. While it uses the aid of a few cooking shortcuts, it still manages to maintain a from-scratch feel with its sweet simplicity and is delicious enough – and pretty enough – that it needs little more than a dusting of powdered sugar over the surface when it comes out of the oven. There’s no frosting or fussing to do here, but you still end up with an absolutely lovely cake in the end.

We can thank Jello themselves for this little beauty; they advertised it in full-color magazine ads in the late 1970s. The red ribbon that gives the cake its name comes from some raspberry flavored jello, and the batter itself uses packaged yellow cake mix (which means it will take you all of five minutes to mix this cake up).

It’s a moist cake – thanks to the addition of sour cream – and it’s sweet and simple with a subtle raspberry flavor running throughout. You start by mixing up the batter, pouring a third of it into a bundt or tube pan and then sprinkling the unprepared jello mix over the batter. You top that with another third of the batter, the rest of the jello mix, and the final third of the batter.

As it bakes, the jello blends with the batter and forms a winding swirl that’s like a fun little surprise when you slice into the finished bake.

While I love a three-tiered finely frosted concoction from time to time, I much prefer this simple kind of everyday cake that you can make up at a moment’s notice for any kind of occasion, no matter how casual. This everyday cake, though, feels a tad more special than many of its counterparts, even if it’s no extra effort to put together.