It's getting cold and Halloween is just around the corner - it's literally tomorrow -, which can only mean one thing. It's Autumn. Some of you have been waiting for it since Christmas, others might not be as pleased with the frequent rain and cold wind that have made their entry in our everyday lives. I include myself in that last category. I do like some aspects that come with Autumn - like I made clear last year in this post -, but I just don't get why people would want to go outside and go for long walks when it's absolutely freezing your blimmin' nose off. Obviously, in films they make it all very romantic with scarves and cuddles and leaves that have turned the park into a beautiful orange and red duvet, but in reality, it hardly ever is like that. For me, anyway.
But, unless I move to California tomorrow, I'm going to have to deal with it - every single year - and I'm planning on doing that by doing one thing, and one thing only: baking. Because if there's anything that can cheer me up in these dark cold rainy days - I'm exaggerating, I know, but you should hear me when it gets to Winter - it's curling up on the couch and watching a movie or reading a good book with a cup of tea or hot chocolate and some home made deliciousness. Should my baking succeed, that is. Sometimes it's absolutely inedible, but yeah, life happens.
So last weekend, I tried something new. Pumpkin spice cake. I gotta tell you, I'm a big fan of pumpkin spice lattes, but baking a pumpkin spice cake was taking it to a whole new level. The main idea was to bake a regular cake, but with a butterfly shaped pumpkin spice cake hidden inside. I was planning on combining two recipes I'd seen on the internet, namely one on Pinterest, which wasn't actually a recipe but it just gave me the idea of putting the butterfly inside and the regular cake around it - they actually did it with a pumpkin, which was really cool, but I didn't have a cutter shaped like that so... - and the other recipe for the pumpkin spice cake and the frosting is from a Zoella baking video. It didn't turn out exactly the way I had hoped it would, but it was delicious nevertheless, so I wanted to show you anyway.
What you're going to need for:
The pumpkin spice cake:
- 280 grams of plain flour
- 2 tsp ground cinnamon
- 1/4 tsp ground ginger
- 1/4 tsp ground cloves
- 1/4 tsp ground nutmeg
- 1/2 tsp salt
- 1 tbsp baking powder
- 1/2 tbsp bicarbonate of soda
- 110 grams of softened butter
- 200 grams of caster sugar
- 5 tbsp soft brown sugar
- 2 eggs
- 180 ml of milk
- 250 grams of pureed pumpkin
The regular cake:
- any cake mix you can find in your local supermarket...
- ... and whatever it says on the package what else you'll need (usually it's butter, milk and eggs)
- an extra 6 grams of baking powder
The frosting:
- 200 grams of cream cheese
- 50 grams of butter
- 350 grams of icing sugar
- 1 tsp vanilla extract
- 1 tsp ground cinnamon
Kitchen tools:
- 2 cake tins
- Kitchenaid or a mixer - you could even use a wooden spoon -
- cake cutter in a shape that you like - it has to fit in both of the cake tins! -
- an oven
- a sieve
- a bowl
- knife
- piping bag and nozzle
This a very intensive recipe, so make sure you have all the time in the world ;)
What you're going to want to do:
Step 1: Preheat your oven to a 180 degrees Celsius.
Step 2: Grease the smallest cake tin - or if they're the same size it really doesn't matter - with butter and put some plain flour all over to prevent the cake from sticking to the tin. Make sure that you give the tin a smack whilst holding it upside down so that all the leftover flour falls out.
Step 3: Sift the flour, spices, salt, baking powder, bicarbonate of soda and the brown sugar - NOT the caster sugar! - together in a bowl.
Step 4: Put the dry ingredients aside and mix the butter and caster sugar together until smooth and slightly lighter of colour.
Step 5: Add one egg at a time to the butter-sugar mixture, making sure it is mixed thoroughly. Then add the milk.
Step 6: Now for the fun part: add in your pureed pumpkin and beat until smooth and - again - thoroughly mixed.
Step 7: Add your dry ingredients - flour, spices, salt etc. - a third at a time, which makes it easier to mix them all in.
Step 8: Next, you can put the mixture into the cake tin and pop that in the over - 180 degrees - for about thirty minutes. If it isn't done by then, leave it in and check every five to ten minutes. If you have a bit of mixture left, you can always just line a muffin tin with some cupcake cases and pop that in to the oven as well. Make sure you take those out after twenty to twenty-five minutes.
TIP: How to see if a cake is cooked? Take a knitting needle - or something that resembles it - and carefully stick it in your cake from top to bottom. Then retrieve. If there is a bit of mixture stuck to the end, the cake hasn't fully cooked yet.
Step 9: When you have gotten your pumpkin cake out of the oven, leave it to cool, then take it out of its tin. Take a knife and cut the cake into slices of approximately 2 - 3 centimetres thick, depending on the size of your cake cutter shape thingy. Eat the caps 'cause you don't need 'em ;)
Step 10: Line your second cake tin with butter and flour. Then take your cake cutter and cut out every single slice, remembering the order they were originally in, and place them on the bottom of your second tin, so that they form a line in the length of the tin.
Step 11: Prepare the mixture for the regular cake, hereby following the instructions on the package. Pour the mixture into the second tin, over the pumpkin spice slices, making sure the mixture gets everywhere; you don't want any holes in your cake.
Step 12: Pop that in the oven for a bit longer than it says on the package, on the heat that is instructed on last named.
Step 13: Moving on to the icing, put your butter and cream cheese into the mixer and beat until smooth.
Step 14: Mix in the icing sugar, a little bit at a time, on a low speed, because otherwise it'll blow up in your face and you will be coughing until next Christmas.
Step 15: Add your cinnamon and vanilla extract. And mix. Obviously. Hah. Uuuhm. Moving on.
Step 16: Take the cake out of the oven and let it cool down entirely before you do the icing.
Step 17: Once the cake has completely cooled, prepare your piping bag and start frosting!
Step 18: You can decorate the cake with whatever you want, I just littered it with pumpkin cake crumbs and some grated pumpkin.
Now when you cut it open, you are supposed to see a yellow-ish cake with a brown coloured shape in the middle / at the bottom, and I applaud you if you've succeeded because turns out, it's actually way harder than it seems. The mixture had pushed my shapes down and so formed some kind of triangle mass at the bottom of the cake.
It was delicious nevertheless.
I really hope you enjoyed reading this post and I'll see y'all very soon with a Paris recap I'm working on!
I hope you all have a very spooky - and delicious - Halloween!!!
Love,
Rosaly
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