A Pumpkin-Flavored Pumpkin Cake

I've had tons of fun with cake decorating over the last couple of years. It's been a rewarding, if not messy, creative outlet from school. Whenever I have an event to make a cake for, I do some googling and look at my cake books to get ideas and then add my own spin on whatever looks cool/do-able. This one was a pumpkin-flavored bundt cake for Jay and Jennie's pumpkin carving party last weekend. I used this pumpkin cake recipe, which I had never tried before. It turned out yummy in a healthy cake sort of way. It uses both whole wheat and white flour. I also replaced some of the oil with apple sauce because two of the reviews said the cake turned out very oily.

This cake design is two bundt cakes, one turned upside-down, stacked on top of each other. After I baked the two bundt cakes, I took the bundt pan and turned it upside down on a cookie sheet. I filled the hole in the bottom of the pan with batter and baked it to make a plug to put in the to of the "pumpkin." I realize now that I should have taken photos of the cake going together, but unless Ryan is in the kitchen willing to document, I'm always way too frenzied to take pics. I also filled a 1/2 pint glass jar with batter to make the stem. So, when I was done baking all those cakes (which took the better part of a day since I only have one bundt pan - Ryan offered to buy me another one but I adamantly refused because my cake and canning cabinets are already out of control), I stacked the two whole bundt cakes, put the plug in the middle, and cut out a piece from the 1/2 pint jar cake to be the stem. The stem was Ryan's idea; I wanted to frost it brown but he convinced me it would look good with no frosting. That was definitely a good call. I got the idea to bake the extra cake in a glass jar from a recipe recipe Ann Marie sent me just the other day.

I frosted the whole thing with store-bought cream cheese frosting. I knew after baking three cakes I wouldn't feel like whipping up a giant batch of home-made frosting. I attempted to put a face on the pumpkin with black frosting, but it looked like a three-year-old had drawn it, so I scraped it off and re-frosted. Simple and classy.

The real pumpkins - you can guess which one is mine and which one is Ryan's