Cranberry Pudding Cake & Sweet Cream Sauce | The Best Cake Recipes (2024)

Christmas never tasted so good! This old fashioned cranberry pudding cake with butter sauce is the perfect ending to a holiday dinner.

My husband loves pudding and Christmas. When I saw this Cranberry Pudding Cake in an old church cookbook with type-written pages, I had to try it. (If you remember our upside down cranberry cake….I had the same feels about that one!)

Now it doesn’t have pudding as we Americans know pudding, but it does have an amazing buttery cream, thin “pudding-like” sauce over the top which soaks in and adds a ton of flavor and sweetness. Don’t skip the butter sauce. You’ll hear me say this 10 times in this article. But I’m hoping you’ll listen. The sauce is what makes the cranberry cake amazing!

Why you’ll love this cake:

• Easy to mix up.
• No eggs!
• Filled with tart fresh cranberries.
• Sweet butter cream sauce soaks into overy bite.
• Pretty and festive for the Christmas season.

What you’ll need for Cranberry Pudding Cake:

• Sugar.
• Butter. We used salted butter and still added salt. You can use unsalted butter if you’d like.
• Milk. We’ve only tested this with whole milk. There is not a lot of fat in the recipe, so whole milk works well.
• Vanilla Extract.
• Flour.
• Baking Powder.
• Salt.
• Cranberries.
• Half and Half. This is a milk that is between cream and whole milk. You can use a mix of those two if you can’t find half and half.

How to Make Cranberry Pudding Cake

This cake bakes in an 8×8 baking pan. You could probably also use a round 8″ cake pan or springform pan if you’d like.

• In a large bowl, use a hand mixer to mix together the sugar and butter.
• Add the milk and vanilla extract and mix again. Scrape the sides of the bowl as you mix. The mixture will not be smooth, but that’s ok.

• Stir in the flour, baking powder and salt. Use the hand mixer to mix it in just until barely combined (on low speed). Scrape the sides of the bowl as needed. Don’t overmix! Overmixing may make your cake a little tough.

• Fold in the coarsely chopped cranberries.
• Pour and spread the batter in the prepared pan.
• Bake for 35-40 minutes.

Our cake took exactly 37 minutes to bake. We used a heavier ceramic baking pan. If you use a lighter metal baking pan it might not take quite as long to bake. Watch the cake closely and don’t let it overbake.

The last step is the sweet cream butter sauce. You’ll just heat the half and half, butter and sugar together in a saucepan. Let it simmer for about 10 minutes. Watch it closely and keep the heat low so it does not scorch.

Then as you serve the cake, pour the warm sauce over top. Delicious!

Recipe Variations:

• Add a touch of nutmeg, cinnamon or a dash of cloves for a spicy flavor.
• If you like cranberry and orange together, add orange zest to the batter and add some orange juice to the butter cream sauce.
• Use a different fresh fruit than cranberries. Blueberries or raspberries would be great!
• Try using eggnog instead of the milk.