Caramel Apple Dump Cake

Being asked to bring dessert is the easy part. Working out what feeds 12 people, travels in the pan it baked in and still only takes 10 minutes to put together is the rest of it. Caramel apple dump cake does all three.

Pour The Butter, Do Not Dot It

Dry, powdery patches of cake mix on top are what goes wrong with dump cakes, and they come from the butter.

Pats of cold butter laid across the top only melt straight down. Wherever there is a gap between them, the mix underneath stays dry, and it is still dry when the cake comes out.

Melted butter mixed with milk pours instead. Go slowly and work across the whole surface, and press any dry patch you can still see down under the liquid with the back of a spoon. My independent recipe tester, Teresia, tested it this way twice and had no dry spots either time.

This is the same technique I’ve been adapting across all of my dump cake recipes:

• Cherry Pineapple Dump Cake
• Pecan Dump Cake
• Blueberry Dump Cake
• Chocolate Dump Cake
• Strawberry Dump Cake
• Cherry Dump Cake
• Pumpkin Dump Cake

Cut The Caramels Straight Into The Pan

Cut caramels stick to each other. A reader making a version of this cut hers into a measuring cup first, and by the time she had finished they had fused into one lump she had to pull apart over the apples.

Cut them over the pan and let the pieces fall where they land. Scattering them afterward is easier than separating them.

They cut more cleanly cold. Straight from the refrigerator the knife goes through without dragging, and the pieces stay separate longer.

What The Caramels Actually Do

They do not melt into a smooth caramel layer, and no caramel does in a dump cake.

Warm out of the oven, you get strings of caramel running through the apples and soft pieces you can barely feel. As it cools, those pieces firm back up into caramel again.

Whether any of this is a problem depends on what you want. If you like biting into a piece of caramel, this is the version to make. If you want it smooth all the way through, use sauce instead.

Use Caramel Sauce If You Want It Smooth

Swap the caramels for about half a cup of caramel sauce drizzled over the apples before the cake mix goes on.

Teresia baked both versions side by side. Warm, she could not tell them apart. Cooled, the sauce version stayed soft while the caramels went chewy, and that was the one she preferred.

Two Things Not To Use

1. Caramel bits stay rubbery rather than softening, and they were the only version in testing that came out worse than the others.
2. Kraft caramels work, but they taste flatter than Werther’s and every one of them has to be unwrapped.

Serve It Warm

This is the difference between people asking for the recipe and people being polite about it.

Warm, the caramel is soft, the apples are loose and it spoons out easily. Cold, the caramel is chewy and the whole thing sets up firmer in the pan. It is still good cold. It is much better warm.

If it has been sitting, put the pan back in a 350°F oven for 10 to 15 minutes, or microwave a bowl of it for about 30 seconds. Either one brings the caramel back.

Recipe Testing Notes

This recipe was originally published in September 2021. Teresia tested this recipe twice, in June and July 2026.

Her first test compared Werther’s chewy caramels against caramel sauce. The second compared Kraft caramels against Kraft caramel bits. Both tests used the melted butter and milk method, and both came out with no dry cake mix on top and no extra time needed past 45 minutes. The results of those tests are reflected in the updated recipe below.

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