The icing is a wonderful mixture of butter and cream cheese with a little almond extract. The cream cheese flavor isn’t overpowering in this light and luscious frosting.

How To Make Cherry Sheet Cake

First you’ll combine your wet ingredients (milk, cherry juice, and vanilla) in a measuring cup.

Sift together the flour, sugar, baking powder and salt into the mixing bowl of a stand mixer.

With the mixer on LOW, add the shortening and half the milk mixture. Scrape down the sides of the bowl to get everything evenly mixed. Next add the remaining milk mixture and the egg whites. Beat on LOW for 2 minutes.

Fold in the cherries and the pecans. Transfer the batter to a 9×13-inch pan sprayed with baking spray. Bake for about 30 minutes.

You can leave the pecans out but I love the buttery crunch they add.

Recipe Tips

It’s really important to sift cake flour. Cake flour is very fine and gets packed down and clumped together in the box. Sift some cake flour into a bowl and then measure out 2 1/2 cups for the recipe. Then you are going to sift it together with the dry ingredients. If you skip pre-sifting, you will measure out too much flour and have a dry cake.