Easy 3-Ingredient Recipes You'll Wish You Knew Sooner

The perfect meal calls for the perfect dessert, and let's be honest: sometimes, we just want the perfect dessert as the meal.  Baking is complicated, and given that it's more of a science than other types of cooking, it can be a bit up-in-the-air as to what you're going to get when your creation comes out of the oven. What if we told you that we have a recipe for a delicious dessert that is nearly foolproof? If it sounds too good to be true, don't worry — it's absolutely real.

Basically, all you're going to need to throw together a quick fruit cobbler is a craving for a fruit-filled dessert, a few simple ingredients, and a boxed cake mix. And everyone has a boxed cake mix in their house ... even if you don't remember ever buying one, which is weird.

Seriously, that's it! If you're thinking about that can of cherry pie filling that's taking up space in the cabinet, then check out the full instructions for this 3-ingredient cherry cobbler. Got a bag of frozen mixed berries sitting in the freezer? Try making 3-ingredient berry cobbler.

Not only is it easy, but you can definitely mix-and-match. Chocolate cake and cherry pie filling? Blueberry filling and a white cake? Strawberries and yellow cake? Once you try it, you might just find yourself stocking up on these three simple ingredients.

Hummus has been around for a long time. According to the BBC, this spread made traditionally from chickpeas has a lot of countries — from Lebanon to Syria to Turkey — wanting to claim it for their own. It was first mentioned in 13th-century Arabic cookbooks, and since then, it's become less of a tried-and-true recipe and more of an idea.

And an incredibly versatile idea, at that. Chocolate hummus might make you question all that you hold dear, but we have a super easy, 3-ingredient hummus that you're guaranteed to love — especially if you're a fan of pumpkin spice. 

We're talking about 3-ingredient pumpkin hummus, of course, and here's why this one's simply brilliant. Since one of the ingredients is your standard chickpea hummus, the base is already done for you — and anything that makes less work in the kitchen is a good thing. Plus, this is a great way to use up any extra pumpkin you might have leftover from a pie or other project. Easy? Healthy? Delicious? Check, check, and check.

There's basically two types of kitchens: there's the perfect (and expensively furnished) kitchens you see on television, and then there's real-life kitchens. Real-life kitchens have an inevitable bit of chaos thrown into the mix, and when it comes time to decide what's for dinner, there's plenty of times our busy schedules just won't allow for a few hours standing around the stove.

Enter: the slow cooker and the Instant Pot. These brilliant devices do all the work for you, letting you juggle your many commitments and still put a home-cooked meal on the table. If you're looking for something hot, hearty, delicious, and easy, check out our 3-ingredient Crock Pot pork chops, which come complete with a secret ingredient you may never have thought to use with pork chops before.

You might just find that even if you have the time to cook, you're going to opt for throwing these tricky cuts of meat into the Crock Pot and using your time elsewhere. Pork chops are tough to get right: they can often turn out dry and tough, but follow these instructions and you'll find yourself pleasantly surprised by how moist and tender they are.

Banana bread is as close to magic as we've ever seen in this cynical world of ours. You're essentially taking overripe, mushy, and texturally questionable bananas and turning them into a deliciously sweet (but not too sweet) bread that's versatile enough to be anything from breakfast in the morning to a snack in the evening. If that's not magic, we don't know what is.

There's a ton of banana bread recipes out there, and unfortunately, many contain either a ton of sugar, or use a boxed cake mix. That's fine, but that's just pretty much making banana cake, isn't it? And we're talking about banana bread here — not cake.

Fortunately, we've perfected a simple, 3-ingredient banana bread that actually comes out looking and tasting like bread! Baking can be tricky, after all, but this delicious recipe is proof that it doesn't always have to be difficult.

There's an almost unlimited number of dinners that are only made better by the addition of some warm biscuits right out of the oven. It turns soup into an entire meal, and makes everything else better: from chili to steak, from beef stew to grilled salmon, from an omelet to our 3-ingredient Crock Pot pork chops, it's all better with a biscuit on the side.

But, biscuits seem like one of those things that seem like a lot of work. They're hard to mix, there's the rolling and the cutting, and then there's just watching through the oven door hoping that they rise like you want them to. Here's the good news: we've simplified the whole thing with our 3-ingredient biscuits.

If you're skimming through this to keep an eye out for what you'll need to pick up at the grocery store, here's a tip. One of these ingredients is buttermilk, but there's a wide range of substitutes — just in case you don't have buttermilk handy, and who does? It inevitably goes bad before you can use it, and wasting food isn't cool. Here's the solution: pick up a box of shelf-stable, powdered buttermilk to add to your pantry, and your problem is solved.

The craving is undeniable: when it hits, you've just got to order yourself some takeout from the local Chinese restaurant. We've all been there — we've all ordered way too much, then done the walk of shame back out to the car while carrying a few massively heavy bags and trying out a facial expression that says, "No, really — I've got a dozen people waiting at home for me, and it definitely isn't just me and the cat." 

If you want to avoid the hefty takeout bill, the inevitable feeling that you ate way too much, and the knowing expressions from other customers who look at you like, "Sure you do ... my cat's name is Mr. Fluffykins, what's yours?", then you should absolutely try your hand at making stir fry at home. 

In addition to all the basic stir fry components — like rice or noodles and your choice of meat — the important thing is the sauce. That can either fulfill your craving for a Chinese meal or leave you sorely underwhelmed — and fortunately, we've got the perfect, 3-ingredient stir fry sauce that will work like a charm no matter what else you're using. You're welcome!

Crud! It's your neighbor's birthday, and you forgot. Or, maybe you promised to make something for the bake sale, or to take in to work for an office party. It's last-minute, the stores are closed, and you're in a bind.

We've got you covered with this super simple, 3-ingredient cake recipe, and there's a few awesome things about it (besides the fact that it's just three ingredients). For starters, you can absolutely make a cake out of it, but if you need cupcakes for, say, a kindergarten birthday party you forgot about, you can definitely do that, too. And it's super versatile: the 3-ingredient vanilla cake ingredients will allow you to mix-and-match flavors as you see fit, and the only thing better than an easy recipe is an easy recipe that you can adjust to any particular flavor profile and occasion. 

And stick with us here, because spoiler alert: this contains ice cream. That's right, the dessert you're going to bake in the oven is made with something you always keep in the freezer, but somehow it all works.

The best part of Alfredo is the sauce, right? It's not just for pasta, it's also pretty perfect if you're looking for a fun way to dress up something like chicken breasts, or to drizzle over a serving of vegetables to mix it up a bit. You can pour and serve, you can pour and bake ... and you can even save some of the leftovers for lunch, alongside some of that extra garlic bread you just happened to make, too. (Funny, how there always ends up being extra garlic bread made, isn't it?)

Hey, no one said there were rules for lunch! 

There's no need to stock up on cans, either — we've come up with a 3-ingredient Alfredo sauce that isn't just made from scratch with none of the question, semi-pronounceable ingredients you'll find listed on the back of the jarred stuff, but it takes just five minutes to make. Yep — five minutes. It takes longer than that to open the jar sometimes.