Apron-Free Cooking - A Pumpkin Cake

This week­end was full of Hal­loween cel­e­brat­ing! Between Hal­loween par­ties and trick or treat … I’m about full of sweets. At the fam­ily gath­er­ing on Sat­ur­day, we avoided candy in favor of a pump­kin cake. Last week I saw a pic­ture of a fancy cake in a mag­a­zine. The instruc­tions seemed sim­ple enough, so I decided to make this pump­kin project with my nieces.

I did some prep by bak­ing the cakes ahead of time. This allowed them to be nice and cool when we were ready to dec­o­rate on Sat­ur­day. It also cut down on the time involved and lim­ited the mess we made in grandma’s kitchen. The assem­bly process was enough chaos for the observers. We ended up with orange icing in places you wouldn’t believe.

Pump­kin Cake

2 cake mixes pre­pared accord­ing to pack­age direc­tions (I used Car­rot Cake)

3 cans of icing (I used cream cheese flavor)

Food Col­or­ing

Bake your cake mixes in Bundt cake pans. Reserve enough cake bat­ter to bake a cup­cake. When the cakes are cooled, slice the cakes in half, hor­i­zon­tally. Place the top of one cake upside down on a serv­ing plate. Spread a layer of icing and top with the bot­tom half of that cake. Spread a layer of icing and place the bot­tom half of the top cake on top. Add a layer of icing and top with the top half of the sec­ond cake.

You should have a stack of cake that looks like a pump­kin. The fluted cake pan will cre­ate ridges that resem­ble a pump­kin. The over­all appear­ance will be round top to bot­tom as well as cir­cu­lar when viewed from above.

The cup­cake will be inserted in the mid­dle of the cake, upside down, to look like a stem on top the pumpkin.

Por­tion out enough icing to com­pletely ice the cup­cake. Mix in green food col­or­ing and set aside. The remain­ing icing will be col­ored orange. I used a ratio of 2 yel­low to 1 red to achieve the orange color I wanted.

The nieces and I each had a bowl of orange icing and we com­pletely slathered the orange all over that cake! We got a fair share on our­selves as well. The last step was to apply the green icing to the stem.

Since the folks who dec­o­rated the cake shown in the mag­a­zine used icing bags and tips and extreme cau­tion, their cake looked like a real pump­kin work of art. Ours looked like the ele­men­tary school alter­na­tive that it was. It tasted just great to us!

Noel Lizotte is break­ing free of cor­po­rate stress with con­ve­nience cook­ing! www.apronfreecooking.com.

Posted by Noel Lizotte on Nov 1 2011. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.