Our classic cherry dump cake recipe starts with two cans of purchased pie filling and one box of vanilla cake mix. You'll need just one more ingredient to assemble this easy dessert recipe. The beauty of a dump cake recipe is that no one will guess just how easy it was to make. The results are similar to a fruit crumble but with a tender, buttery topper.

For this dump cake recipe, you'll want to use canned cherry pie filling rather than just canned cherries. Cherry pie filling is often made with tart or sour cherries, sugar, corn syrup, and a thickener. It's all ready to add to your baking dish and you won't need any other ingredients to make the dump cake filling—unless you'd like to add flavor with an extract. We used almond extract when our Test Kitchen developed the recipe but you could swap in vanilla extract, cake batter extract, or even coconut extract.

When baked, the cake mix topper on this dump cake recipe doesn't rise or get fluffy like a traditional boxed cake. Instead, it becomes crisp and buttery. Our tasters compared it to shortbread. It's the perfect texture and flavor complement to the sweet, juicy cherries. Don't stress if there are a few spots of cake mix powder on the baked cake, the liquid from the cherries will absorb it. To help prevent this, be sure to evenly space the sliced butter on the top of the cake.