The Great Pumpkin Cake

 

I know Thanksgiving, Black Friday and Cyber Monday are over and EVERYONE  is thinking Christmas, but it is still technically Fall till December 21st so I am posting about my Thanksgiving Pumpkin cake that you can make any time of year.

 

A dear friend showed me a picture of this cake from a gourmet magazine and I thought I could replicate it without all the fancy ingredients and directions.....I "thought"!

 

It came out pretty good though so I am sharing it with you. I brought it to that friends house for Thanksgiving and there were oohs and aahs all around!

 

The recipes for the cake, filling and frosting follow the how-to directions.

 

The idea is to put two bundt cakes together on top of each other to form a pumpkin shape, with a filling in the middle. If you have one of those bundt pans (like from Pampered Chef) that has the grooves in it, that's perfect! Only thing I found out was that using a buttercream frosting kinda covered up the grooves....it was too thick! Next time, if there is one, I would use an orange tinted glaze instead.

 

 

I decided that two whole cake recipes would be too thick of a cake and one cake would not be thick enough (you can use one cake but you would have to bake one half at a time to get the two rounded, grooved halves to make a pumpkin shape).

 

I made batter for two cakes, separately, and filled the pan a little more than half each and baked them one at at time. I put the leftover batter from each cake in an 8" cake pan and had an extra cake for another time.

 

I trimmed the flat side of one cake evenly so that the top would fit on. I spread the pumpkin cream cheese filling on the bottom half and then put the top half on, making sure I lined up the groove marks from top to bottom as good as I could!

 

 

 

 

 

I smoothed the filling all the way around to make an even frosting field.
Next came making the frosting the orange of a pumpkin! I used my daughters professional cake decorating colors. I was adding and experimenting with yellow, red and bronze to get just the right color....until she told me that too much colorant can make the frosting greasy and unspreadable. I stopped at a light orange hue.

I had saved a pumpkin stem from a real pumpkin but wasn't sure how I was going to put it on with the hole in the middle of the cake. Remember the extra batter made into an extra cake? I took a piece of that and stuffed the hole with it, frosted over it and stuck the stem on. Then I took the metal spatula and formed grooves into the frosting (actually that is the technique the gourmet cake recipe used).

TA DAAAA....

 

Jimbo's Chocolate Cake

 

1 box Duncan Hines chocolate fudge cake mix

4 large eggs

1 box instant (3.5 oz.) chocolate pudding mix

1/2 cup oil

3/4 cup water

1 cup sour cream

1 cup chocolate chips

 

Mix all ingredients except the chocolate chips by hand till moistened, then mix in an electric mixer

3 minutes. Pour into greased bundt pan. Sprinkle 1 cup chocolate chips over the batter and press in.

Bake at 350 for 50-55 minutes.

 

Pumpkin Cream Filling

 

1 - 8 oz. package cream cheese, softened

1/3 cup canned pumpkin

1/4 cup sugar

1/4 teaspoon cinnamon

 

In a bowl whisk together ingredients till thickened. Spread on bottom layer of cake.

 

Buttercream Frosting

 

3 cups confectioners sugar

1/3 cup (5 1/3 tablespoons) butter, softened

 1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla

1-2 tablespoons milk

 

Cream butter and sugar in mixer. Add vanilla. Add milk as needed for consistency.

 

If you decide to try this at home, please let me know your technique!

 

It really tastes fantastic and isn't that what really matters?

 

Yes!

 

 

AnnMarie :)