Meet Funny Cake: The Dessert That Will Have Your Family Fighting Over the Last Piece

Pennsylvania Dutch foods include delights like pickled beets and eggs and shoofly pie, but there’s one recipe you don’t always find at your local Amish market. Funny Cake is a homemade Pennsylvania Dutch dessert that combines vanilla cake with a gooey chocolate bottom layer, all baked in a buttery pie crust. Our readers absolutely love it, so I decided to give the chocolatey treat a try in my own kitchen.

The Allrecipes user who submitted our most popular funny cake recipe says the cakes are, “baked in a pie crust with a chocolate ‘funny’ layer that sinks to the bottom while baking." Reviewers love the dessert, saying it’s “absolutely delicious” and “a big hit” whenever they make it. With these rave reviews in mind, I gathered the ingredients for Pennsylvania Dutch Funny Cake and went to work.

What Is a Pennsylvania Dutch Funny Cake?

In short, Pennsylvania Dutch Funny Cake is an Amish or Mennonite recipe that features vanilla cake baked in a nine-inch pie crust with chocolate sauce. Pouring a warmed chocolate mixture atop room temperature cake batter and tossing the whole thing into a hot oven causes the chocolate to sink to the bottom of the pie—er, cake—to create a gooey chocolate bottom. The result? A vanilla cake baked into a pie crust with the perfect swirl of chocolate in every bite.

How to Make a Pennsylvania Dutch Funny Cake

Making a Pennsylvania Dutch Funny Cake was easier than it looked. I started by warming sugar, cocoa powder, water, and vanilla extract in a saucepan until it was almost, but not quite, boiling. After setting the warmed chocolate mixture aside, I made the cake batter, creaming together sugar and butter, adding eggs and vanilla extract, then combining the wet ingredients with a mix of flour and baking powder.

I used store-bought 9-inch pie crusts for my Funny Cakes. Although the original recipe calls for three pie crusts, I decided to work with only two pies after reading notes from Allrecipes reviewers who’d tried it. As it turns out, the reviewers were right. There’s just enough cake batter to spread into two 9-inch pie crusts. Once the batter is in the crusts, all that’s left to do is pour the chocolate mixture on top of the batter and bake the pies at 350 degrees F for about 40 minutes.

Tips for Making a Pennsylvania Dutch Funny Cake

In addition to using two pie crusts instead of three, I changed the bake time for this cake recipe. The original poster says to bake the pies for 25 to 35 minutes, but it took about 40 minutes at 350 degrees F for a cake tester to come out of the cakes clean. 

There’s also no need to worry if your chocolate mixture does get to boiling temperature. Mine came to a boil fast, so I moved the pan to a cool burner and stirred it a few times throughout the process to let it cool just a bit. My cakes turned out absolutely fine with a perfect gooey chocolate bottom.

My Honest Review of Pennsylvania Dutch Funny Cake

My two Pennsylvania Dutch Funny Cakes came out of the oven looking gorgeous. The perfectly-raised vanilla cakes had swirls of chocolate throughout and a buttery, browned pie crust. I couldn’t wait to try it.

True to its name, it was, indeed, a “funny” creation. The vanilla cake was fluffy and sweet, with the perfect hint of vanilla flavoring. The chocolate, which had mostly all settled along the bottom of the pie crust, stayed gooey and moist and was a pretty delicious surprise to find when cutting into the pie.

My teenage daughter, who isn’t a big dessert fan, came into my office later in the day and said, “What are those pies on the counter?”

“They’re Amish funny cakes,” I told her. “You’ll probably like them because they aren’t super sweet and the pie crust is a little salty, so it’s really well-balanced with its flavors.”

Later, I went into the kitchen to discover she’d eaten not one, but two slices of Funny Cake. From a kid who dislikes cake so much we don’t even get one for her birthday, this was the biggest praise Funny Cakes could have gotten in my house.