Easy Peach Cobbler with Cake Mix

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Last Updated on December 17, 2023

The overlapping of cultures that happens as a result of historical events often leads to the birth of many exceptional culinary combinations.

For instance, Europeans combined mint and chocolate in the 16th century. Meanwhile, Grecians combined grape leaves and rice over two millennia ago. Last but not least, English settlers in the US combined baked batter and mushy fruits in the 19th century, coming up with what we call cobbler nowadays.

Close up of peach cobbler with cake mix

Cobblers are named this way because the batter topping isn’t distributed equally over the fruit. Instead, it’s spooned spontaneously, resulting in a cobbled appearance and texture. It’s one of the most famous peach desserts, and most people serve it with cold vanilla ice cream.

Originally, the peach cobbler was made using fresh peeled peaches and batter made from scratch. But nowadays, people are constantly looking for recipe shortcuts to enjoy the delicious dessert without standing too long in the kitchen. So they started using canned peaches instead of fresh ones and readymade batter instead of making it from scratch. And it worked!

The delicious taste of crunchy batter with the ever-sweet peaches remained the same, and some people even started calling it peach cobbler dump cake. Today, I’ll tell you how to achieve the best flavor possible with my easy peach cobbler with cake mix recipe.

Preparation Time

My peach cobbler recipe won’t take you too long to make, and you won’t have to work in the kitchen for more than five minutes. Then, you can bake the cobbler in the oven and let it cool.

  • Prep time: 5 mins
  • Baking time: 40 mins
  • Cooling time: 30 mins
  • Total time: 75 mins
The delicious taste of crunchy batter with the ever-sweet peaches remained the same, and some people even started calling it peach cobbler dump cake. Today, I'll tell you how to achieve the best flavor possible with my easy peach cobbler with cake mix recipe.

Ingredients

Here’s a list of the ingredients you’ll need to make my easy dessert recipe:

  • 45 oz of canned peaches in syrup or fresh peaches
  • 1/2 a cup of light brown sugar (optional)
  • 1/2 a cup of cold butter (unsalted or salted butter)
  • 1/4 a cup of melted butter
  • 15 oz of yellow or white cake mix
  • 1 1/2 tablespoons of cornstarch (optional)
  • Ground cinnamon to taste
  • Whipped cream (optional)
  • Vanilla ice cream (optional)
  • An assortment of nuts (optional)

If you use unsalted butter, add a quarter of a teaspoon of salt to the cake mix. Also, you can substitute light brown sugar with dark sugar if you don’t have it. However, I don’t recommend it because it has a bitter taste that might affect the sweetness of your dessert.

How to Make Peach Cobbler With Cake Mix

Now that you have all the ingredients ready, it’s time to whip up a quick and easy dessert. The ingredients I listed above will give you ten servings of cobbler. If you want to make less or more than that, you should adjust the amounts accordingly.

canned peaches in a casserole dish

1. Prepare the Peaches

If you use canned peaches, all you have to do is strain a can of them from the peach juice or syrup, put the strained fruits aside, and leave the other two in their juices.

If you prefer to go fresh, you’ll need to do a little more than that. Here’s what to do to prepare fresh peaches properly.

The easiest and quickest way to peel peaches is to boil them and throw them in ice water. So first, boil water in a large pot and throw in your peaches. Leave them inside for 30 seconds at maximum so that they don’t cook. Then, take them out and lower them into a bowl filled with water and ice cubes.

Afterward, you won’t even need a knife to peel the peaches. Instead, you can remove the skin with your fingers. Once you finish, grab each peach and twist its side in different directions so that it separates into two parts. Next, remove the seed using a spoon or your finger, then throw it away.

You can use another method to peel peaches, but it’s slower than this one, so I don’t use it often. You can use a vegetable peeler and peel towards the stem end of the fruits.

But make sure to use light pressure if your peaches are soft because they tend to bruise easily. Also, for faster peeling, you can rotate the peach as you unpeel it, as you’d do with an orange or an apple. If you use this method, you should wash the peaches thoroughly before peeling them to clean any dirt.

Put the peach halves on a cutting board with their cut sides facing down. Then, use a sharp knife to make vertical cuts across them. Now, you should have a generous amount of sliced peaches in front of you.

Grab the slices, throw them in a saucepan, and add one cup of granulated sugar and a quarter a teaspoon of salt. Put the saucepan on medium heat till the sugar dissolves and the peaches produce juice. Then, remove the saucepan from the stove and put it aside.

2. Preheat the Oven

To ensure the peach cobbler bakes perfectly and reaches that attractive golden brown color, preheat the oven to 375 degrees before you start working on the dessert. Then, grab a baking pan or casserole dish from your kitchen and smear its surfaces with melted butter. The ideal pan size to use for this recipe is 9×13 inches.

3. Add the Peaches

If you use canned peaches, grab the strained slices and pour them into the greased casserole dish. Then, empty the other two cans and their juices into the dish. You won’t strain the other two because you want your cake mix cobbler to be juicy and soft.

As for fresh peaches, grab the saucepan you put aside earlier and empty it into the baking pan.

cake mix on top of canned peaches

4. Mix and Add the Dry Ingredients

Now, it’s time to mix the ground cinnamon, cornstarch, and light brown sugar in a small bowl. Once they’re thoroughly mixed, pour them all over the peaches. Mix the peaches and the dry ingredients till the fruits are coated thoroughly.

5. Add the Cake Mix and Butter

Grab your dry cake mix, and pour it all over the peaches. But it’s essential here that you distribute it evenly so that the peaches are covered thoroughly.

Then, use a knife to cut the cold butter into thin slices. The slices should be enough to cover the entire casserole dish, but it’s fine to leave spaces between them if they aren’t. If you leave spaces, pour some of the melted butter into them. This ensures you don’t get dry cake in your mouth while enjoying the flavorsome dessert.

butter on top of cake mix peach cobbler

6. Bake the Peach Cobbler

Your peach cobbler is ready now for baking. Push the baking pan into the oven, and leave it inside for 40 minutes. Check it after 30 minutes to see if it turned golden brown. If the color looks satisfying to you, take the pan out of the oven.

Then, let the peach cobbler cool for about 30 minutes. Doing so is critical to let the batter and juices thicken into an attractive, delicious texture. If you serve it before it cools, it’ll be way too mushy to notice the contrast of textures between the batter and the fruits.

peach cobbler topped with vanilla ice cream

7. Serve the Peach Cobbler

After the peach cobbler dump cake cools down, you can decorate it and serve it. I like to serve it with a scoop of vanilla ice cream or whipped cream. But ice cream rules because of the heavenly combination of the cold, creamy texture and the crumbled cobbler.

Another ingredient I like to add before serving is a crunchy assortment of nuts. I often add crushed almonds, walnuts, hazelnuts, and pecans. They enhance the texture of the absolutely delicious dish and complement the mushiness of peaches nicely.

Tips and Tricks

Now that you know how to make peach cobbler, I’ll give you a few tips and tricks to make the dessert exceptional.

Add Cornstarch

While many people don’t add cornstarch to their peach cobbler recipe, it acts as a thickener and gives the peach syrup a smooth and delicious texture. If you don’t use it, your syrup’s consistency will be too thin.

Store It Properly

If you don’t finish the peach cobbler in one setting and want to save the rest of it for later, you can store it in the refrigerator. However, you should put it in a covered container first so that it doesn’t turn too mushy. After that, you can leave it inside for up to three days.

You can also freeze it if you want it to stay for longer than a few days. First, let the cobbler cool, then wrap the baking dish with plastic wrap and aluminum foil. Afterward, push it into the freezer for up to two months.

Get Creative With the Fruits

Although this is a peach cobbler recipe, you don’t necessarily have to use peach to make a cobbler. Instead, you can use any canned or fresh fruit you like. For instance, you can use berries, apples, pears, or mangos. On top of that, you can mix and match with the fruits. Try making a cobbler filled with both berries and apples, for example.

Add Lemon Juice

While ground cinnamon gives the dessert a delicious fragrance and spice, you can skip it and use lemon juice. Lemon juice makes for a bright, zesty flavor that perfectly works with peaches. That said, make sure to use freshly squeezed juice because packed juice often contains large amounts of sugar and can affect the final flavor.

Make the Peach Cobbler Spicy

If you want to add a dash of spiciness to your peach cobbler, you can make it using a spice cake mix. It consists of nutmeg, cinnamon, yellow cake mix, ginger, and some other ingredients. The contrast between its spiciness and the sweetness of the peaches will give you an exceptionally tasty dish.

However, only use spice cake mix if you’ve tasted it before and love its flavor. The clash of spicy and sweet isn’t for everybody.

Use Yellow Cake Mix

Although I said you’re free to use a yellow or white cake mix, I prefer using a yellow mix because it’s thicker and moister than its counterpart. It also adds a tasty custard flavor to the dump cake. Meanwhile, white cake requires frosting or whipped cream to make it softer.

Use Ripe Peaches

This point doesn’t make a difference if you’re using canned peaches. But if you’re using fresh ones, you should pick ripe and soft peaches, not hard ones. Hard peaches will take longer in the oven to soften and bake.

To know if the peaches are ripe, check their color first. If they’re fully reddish-yellow, then you can use them. But if they have any traces of green, then wait for them to mature first. Also, ripe peaches have a sugary fragrance that shows once you cut into them.

That said, don’t use overripe peaches because they’ll be too mushy for baking. Eliminate any fruits with wrinkles and look for symmetrical ones instead.

Another trick you should know about is to taste the peaches before using them in the recipe. Peaches vary in sweetness, so tasting them will help determine how much sugar you’ll need to achieve your desired taste.

Cut the Peaches Thin

A common mistake when making a peach cobbler or a pie is to cut the peaches into thick slices. However, you should avoid doing this at all costs. Thick slices take much longer in the oven to bake.

So, for instance, your cake mix cobbler might be golden brown and baked completely, but the peach is still crunchy. This isn’t ideal because you’ll have to get the cobbler out of the oven before the crust burns, but your dessert won’t be as soft as you want it to be.

More so, make sure to cut the slices evenly. If they don’t have the same size, they won’t bake equally.

Skip Peeling the Peaches

From time to time, I like to make my peach cobbler without peeling the fruits. Once in the oven, the peel softens and adds a sugary flavor to the dessert. On top of that, it makes it more aesthetically appealing because of the rich color.

However, you should expect the peel to separate from the flesh during baking.

Grill the Peaches

You can add a smoky and extra-sweet flavor to your cobbler by grilling the peaches before using them in the filling. After peeling the peaches, sprinkle them with oil, cinnamon, and brown sugar, then put them over a grill on medium heat. Keep them on the grill for five minutes on each side.

Cobbler vs. Pie

Many people confuse cobblers and pies together because of the similarity in their appearance and recipe. However, they couldn’t be more different.

First of all, when making pie, you cover a dish with dough and blind-bake it before adding the stuffing to make it crustier. The crust of a pie keeps it together and makes it look like an organized dish.

Meanwhile, cobblers are more chaotic in the sense that you throw the ingredients together haphazardly. You don’t add a bottom crust, and you pour the dough on top of the fruit instead of under it.

Generally, a cobbler is easier to cook and bake than a pie, and its ingredients are more widely available. Rolling out a pie’s dough carefully and ensuring it doesn’t break or crumble can be challenging, especially for beginners.

Another main difference is that pies take much longer to bake. Some of them take more than two hours. Meanwhile, cobblers spend a maximum of an hour in the oven before being ready for serving.

That being said, pies and cobblers are similar in their serving techniques. They’re both best served with vanilla ice cream or whipped cream.

Frequently Asked Questions

How Do You Keep Peach Cobbler From Getting Runny?

Peach cobbler gets runny when you add too much juice or syrup to it or when you don’t let it cool before serving. Whether you’re using peaches in light syrup or heavy syrup, you shouldn’t pour too much of it into the pan.

Do You Use Eggs in Peach Cobbler With Cake Mix?

In this recipe, no, you don’t. But if you choose the long way and make cake batter from scratch, then, yes, you’ll need to use eggs. Eggs are a crucial ingredient in cake because the yolk helps the ingredients stay combined together and keeps the texture soft. Without eggs, you’ll end up with a dry and chewy cake.

Is Peach Cobbler Filling Similar to Peach Pie Filling?

Yes, it is. When making filling for a peach pie, you’ll need ripe peaches, cornstarch, brown sugar, cinnamon, and lemon juice. But beware that canned fruits don’t work well with pies. They need to be thickened first, and they won’t result in the same delicious taste as fresh fruits.

Is Heavy Syrup or Light Syrup Better for Canned Peaches?

It depends on your preference. If you have a sweet tooth and want your dessert to taste extra sweet, you should go with heavy syrup. But if you want to reduce the number of calories in your dessert and make it lighter, go for the latter.

Is Peach Cobbler With Cake Mix Vegan?

No, cake mix peach cobbler isn’t vegan because cake mix includes milk and eggs. If you want to make a vegan dessert, you should look for a brand that sells vegan cake mixes and use vegan butter.

Can I Reheat Peach Cobbler?

While you can reheat it in the oven for a few minutes, I don’t recommend it. Heating peach cobbler with cake mix makes it turn soggy and lose its attractive crunch. Instead, I advise preparing the topping and filling and putting them in the refrigerator. Then, get them out and bake them right before serving.

If you have to reheat the dessert, cover the baking dish with foil and push it into a preheated oven at 375 degrees. Leave it inside for 20-30 minutes, then pull it out.

close up of peach cobbler with cake mix
Yield: 8

Peach Cobbler with cake mix

Prep Time: 5 minutes
Cook Time: 50 minutes
Total Time: 55 minutes

I love a good peach cobbler, and this one made with cake mix is my new favorite! It's quick and easy to make, and it's so delicious.

Ingredients

Instructions

  1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. 
  2. Pour the canned peaches into a 9" baking dish.  If you are trying to reduce the amount of sugar in the recipe, replace the liquid equivalent or the syrup with water. 
  3. Pour 1/2 bag of gluten-free yellow cake mix over the top and then the butter over the top. 
  4. Place in oven on top of a baking sheet.  After 45 minutes, check the crumble and poke holes in the top near spots that are dry.   Also, add more melted butter to the top where the dry spots are. 
  5. When the top is golden brown and bubbly, remove from the oven and let cool before eating. 

Nutrition Information:

Yield:

8

Serving Size:

g

Amount Per Serving: Calories: 388Total Fat: 14gSaturated Fat: 8gTrans Fat: 1gUnsaturated Fat: 4gCholesterol: 31mgSodium: 568mgCarbohydrates: 64gFiber: 2gSugar: 37gProtein: 4g

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13 thoughts on “Easy Peach Cobbler with Cake Mix”

  1. I’ve got a lot of ripe peaches on the counter right now, so I might make something like this with fresh fruit while it’s in season. Don’t have that flour but I can probably make up a similar GF flour mix, right? Thanks for the inspiration.

    Reply
  2. What a simple and delicious recipe. It totally reminds me of the southern dump cakes we used to make using those unhealthy boxes of jiffy cake mix! I’m going to give this a try with a grainfree cake mix! Thanks for the great idea and recipe! 🙂 Yum!

    Reply
  3. First of all, swoon!!! I LOVE peach cobbler! When I first read the title my eyes played a trick on me and read “each peach” and my mind went right to a childhood book “Each Peach Pear Plum” that my mom read to me {which had pie in it}. Anyway, so yummy and fun that somehow this reminded me of a lost memory.

    Reply

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