How to Make a Number Cake!

Colorful, trendy number cakes or letter cakes are easy to make with this shaping method, no specialty pans required!

If you’ve seen those trendy number shaped cakes or letter cakes, you know how cute they are. But if you don’t like investing in single-use pans or kitchen tools, there’s an easy way to make a gorgeous number cake without any specialty tools!

I made these number cakes with an easy vegan cookie dough that I discovered through the vegan chocolate chip cookie bake off. But you can use any recipe you like–there are lots of great recipes in the brown butter chocolate chip cookie bake off!

Why you’ll love this recipe

• Efficient: Not only is there no need to purchase a specialty cake pan, you also won’t be left with a ton of cake trimmings. Using a cookie base makes it much easier to bake a freeform shape and trim it down to size!
• Great for groups: As long as you have a large box, these cookie cakes are easy to transport and perfect for cutting up into many pieces for a group.
• Economical: these specialty cakes can be pricey! For the price of a few homemade cookies and frosting, you can easily make a professional-looking version at home.

Ingredient Notes

• Brown sugar: You can use a mixture of brown and white if you’d like a slightly lighter hue
• Cornstarch: This helps provide a thick and soft texture to the cookie base. If you don’t have it, I’d recommend omitting it and adding 2 additional tablespoons of flour to make up for the volume.
• Refined coconut oil: Refined coconut oil is a great neutral substitute for butter, though you can use unrefined coconut oil if you want a coconut flavor. If you’d like to keep the cookie dough vegan, plant-based butter or another neutral oil like vegetable, canola, grapeseed or avocado oil are acceptable substitutes (though your cookie texture will be softer if using an oil). If you don’t need to keep the cake vegan, feel free to use butter here.
• Almond milk: This acts as a dough binder instead of eggs. You can use any kind of milk in place of the almond milk.

How to make a number cake or letter cake

For this number cake tutorial, it’s just three easy steps:

1. Make the dough and shape: Mix up the cookie dough and shape it into the numbers or letters you like on a cookie sheet. The dough will spread, so make the numbers or letters a little skinnier than ideal to account for spread.
2. Bake the cookie and trim the details: Once the cookie dough is baked, let it cool for just 5 minutes so you don’t burn yourself. Using a knife, gently trim away any excess dough to clean up the shape of your numbers or letters. Let your cake cool completely to firm up the shape.
3. Decorate: I like to use a plain piping tip to pipe the frosting onto the cooled cake before topping with candy and fruit. If you don’t have piping equipment, try putting the frosting in a plastic bag. Snip a corner off and use the bag as a makeshift piping bag!

Tips and Tricks

Here are a few tips for substitutions and changes:

• To scale down: This recipe yields two very large cookies (equivalent to a batch of 16 cookies). If you’re baking for a smaller crowd, just halve the recipe and scale the cookie shapes accordingly.
• Cookie cake base: The cookie cake base is a double batch of Oh Ladycakes’ coconut oil chocolate chip cookies (recipe is now paywalled). (This was one of my favorites from the vegan chocolate chip cookie bake off). I chose it for its doughy and soft texture, but you can use any cookie dough for the base.
• Buttercream: I used a basic vanilla buttercream (you can easily use regular or vegan butter). You can add cocoa powder to make it a chocolate buttercream or use any favorite buttercream recipe!
• Organic powdered sugar: To avoid an overly sweet buttercream, Buttermilk by Sam uses organic powdered sugar, which is less sweet! It really does make a huge difference in taste.
• Frosting the cake: To get the signature frosting dollops, I used this reusable frosting applicator with a round frosting tip. You may be able to use a plastic bag paired with a round tip to do the piping if needed.

If you need to bake any celebration treats, I hope this inspires you to try a number cake!

FAQs