State fairs come around just once a year, but the need for funnel cake happens way more often than that! Our funnel cake recipe makes a carnival-worthy cake that is fried to golden-brown perfection, easy to tear and share, and finished with a thick dusting of confectioners’ sugar. It will really make you feel like it’s summertime at the state fair, sticky fingers and all!

Next time you get a hankering for the confectioners’ sugar-laden fried delicacy, pull up this recipe. We’ll walk you through making funnel cake the easy way. And if you’re really hankering for all the fairground treats, tuck into these iconic state fair foods.

Ingredients for Funnel Cake

• Eggs: Bring your eggs to room temperature so they blend better into the batter. There’s a science to it!
• Milk: You can use 2% milk or whole milk for this recipe. Be cautious if you decide to use a liquid with less fat than 2% milk. It may affect the taste and texture of the funnel cake and won’t be carnival-level quality.
• All-purpose flour: All-purpose flour provides just enough structure to build the structure of the cake, but it has a tender crumb for easy tearing and sharing.
• Oil: Pick an oil that has a smoke point of 400°F or higher, has a neutral taste and fits in your budget. We highly recommend canola oil!
• Confectioners’ sugar: Is any funnel cake complete without a thick dusting of confectioners’ sugar?

Taste of Home

Garbage bread looks like an ordinary loaf when hot from the oven—until you slice it open and see the tantalizing spirals of melted cheese, beef, pickles and bacon hidden inside. That’s the magic of garbage bread recipes! My family and I have added this recipe to the list of our favorite dinner recipes, but thick slices of cheeseburger bread are also great for snacks and Super Bowl parties—especially when they’re served with a tangy dipping sauce.

What is garbage bread?

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The exact origins of garbage bread are a little hazy, but the idea must have certainly come from a frugal home cook who realized that it was a tasty way to repurpose leftovers. The stuffed bread is similar to stromboli, since its fillings are rolled up in bread dough and then baked. It picked up the “garbage” label because the recipe is a convenient way to clean out your fridge and use up leftover cooked meats, cheese and veggies. (It’s sometimes confused with the regional New York dish called garbage plate, which is a whole different beast.)

Garbage bread recipes have taken off on social media, with creators incorporating all kinds of flavors and ingredients into the swirly slices. This take on the dish is a cheeseburger garbage bread, which includes everything from the mustard to the pickles.

Garbage Bread Ingredients

• Refrigerated pizza dough: Most stores stock bags of pizza dough in the deli area or refrigerated case. Another option is to use easy homemade pizza dough.
• Ground beef: Add garbage bread to the list of recipes that use a pound of ground beef.
• Bacon: While many types of bacon would work well in this savory bread recipe, I prefer the flavor of applewood- or hickory-smoked bacon in this cheesy bread.
• Cheese: I use two types of cheese in this recipe. The cheddar cheese is added for the flavor, while Jack is one of the best melting cheeses. Freshly shred or grate your own cheese, since it will melt better than store-bought bags of cheese that contain cellulose (to prevent clumping).
• Onion: Cook the meat with diced onion for the most flavorful beef mixture. Diced frozen onions can help you cut down on chopping time.
• Ketchup: It can get confusing with so many ketchup brands out there. You likely have a bottle already, but if you don’t, we like Heinz, French’s and Hunt’s.
• Mustard: Turn to regular yellow mustard to pack that classic cheeseburger flavor into the garbage bread.
• Pickles: Slice up dill pickle spears to layer inside the filled bread. Using dill pickle relish is another way to incorporate the flavor.
• Banana peppers: Pickled yellow banana pepper rings are available in mild or spicy varieties. Choose your favorite.
• Spices: To flavor the garbage bread recipe filling, use a simple blend of salt, pepper and garlic powder.
• Egg: Brushing the rolled dough with beaten egg will cause it to emerge from the oven with a beautiful golden brown color. The wash also holds optional sprinkles of sesame seeds or coarse salt.

Taste of Home

This Raspberry Coffee Cake deserves your attention if you want to make a crowd-pleasing dessert. With its moist and tender cake, tangy yet sweet raspberry filling, crunchy topping and yummy glaze, this cake is one that people will want again and again. The recipe looks like it contains a lot of steps, but it’s much simpler than it seems. You can also take a few shortcuts to help make the process go faster.

This is a wonderful cake to bring to a party or make when you have company. The filling needs refrigeration, but it stores well and if you have leftovers (emphasis on “if”), they can last for several days. This cake doesn’t take that long to make and uses basic ingredients that are easy to find if they’re not already in your kitchen.

Raspberry Coffee Cake Ingredients

• Raspberries: Use unsweetened raspberries for this (in other words, no sweetened purees).
• Lemon juice: Lemon juice helps keep the flavor of the raspberry filling nice and light after cooking.
• Sugar: Raspberries can be a bit tart, so sugar helps sweeten the mixture. Plus, as the sugar melts, the whole mixture will become more like thick syrup or jam.
• Cornstarch: This will thicken the filling.
• All-purpose flour: All-purpose has the right protein and gluten level for the cake to have good structure once baked.
• Sugar: Sugar in baked goods helps them become more dense or cake-like.
• Baking powder and baking soda: Baking powder makes the batter rise. However, here you’ll want to add that extra baking soda to work with the acidity from the sour cream. Using sour cream to flavor and tenderize batter can add too much acid to the mix, which neutralizes the baking soda in the baking powder. So, you add a little more baking soda in addition to the baking powder to help account for that extra acidity.
• Cold butter: Cold butter makes dough flakier.
• Eggs: These bind the ingredients for the batter.
• Sour cream: This makes the cake more moist and rich without adding a lot of extra liquid.
• Vanilla extract: This gives the cake a warm vanilla flavor that doesn’t compete with the raspberry filling.
• All-purpose flour: This gives streusel topping its crumbly texture.
• Sugar: This sweetens the topping.
• Butter: Butter binds together the flour and sugar, as well as the nuts.
• Chopped pecans: These add some crunch to the streusel topping.
• Confectioner’s sugar: This creates a smooth, white glaze that stands out on the streusel topping. Use confectioner’s sugar because the cornstarch it contains will prevent the glaze from dissolving into the warm cake.
• Milk: This turns the sugar into a drizzly glaze without making it too watery.
• Vanilla extract: This adds flavor to the glaze that’s warmer than that of just “sugar.”

Taste of Home