happy bundt day!

Sweet serendipity! Bundt day coincided with my mum giving me an awesome retro bundt pan! But what to make for bundt day? I desired also to get my bundt onto this bundt-loving website and for that I figured a BIG bundt was needed. So what to make, what to make… I tried to make a modified icecream bread but it was still a bit of a loser (more work obviously needed). I went back to the drawing board and Bingo! I had it. Here’s my thought equation: pumpkin puree + two circular bundts on top of each other + orange food colouring = pumpkin cake that looks like a pumpkin! 

Then I googled it. Turns out I wasn't so genius as I'd originally thought. Figured. Sigh. Siiigh (but totally in awe here). Oh, c’mon! But then I ate some cinnamon pudding cake and got a sugar rush and said to myself, "Screw it, I am going to OWN this pumpkin."

Even though it’s Spring right now, I am SORTED pumpkin puree-wise. In Winter, every time I went to the shops and pumpkins were less than $2, I’d buy, like, six, and just go to town roasting, pureeing and freezing them.

I decided to make two different types of pumpkin cake. One was this thoroughly tested recipe from Allrecipes and the other was the sweet potato three-layer cake from Sky High. Two cakes using two different methods and there was one very clear winner! The cake from Allrecipes was just perfect – it was super easy and quick, moist, and tasted divine. The Sky High cake was structurally more solid but lighter in flavor and moistness and much more complex to put together. My vote is definitely for the Allrecipes cake (the top layer in the photos). You can see that the top layer is a lot more orange than the bottom layer which is because the top layer had nearly double the pumpkin in it (major factor as to why it was so delish I think).

I made the stalk and crappy “leaf” (am pushing it calling it a leaf) out of marzipan and about 3 whole bottles of food colouring – it is very messy creating the colour brown out of red, blue and yellow. I didn’t have a leaf cutter so just cut the leaf shape out with a sharp knife. I am ashamed of it and in all the photos I have hidden it by moving it behind the stalk...

The icing is cream cheese and orange one. I added orange food colouring (aka red and yellow mixed – I am such an artist) to it, increasing the amount as I used it so that I had varying shades of orange, layered on top of each other. I think that’s called ‘different shades’ or something.

The cakes sliced like a dream and one person actually said, “Is that a real pumpkin?” Success! I think? Well, anyway, it was yum and it was attractive and it was a bundt on Bundt Day! Happy Bundt Day!