Pumpkin Cake with Burnt Orange Silk Meringue Buttercream

Today is Halloween. It is a festival day that is fairly new to Australia and was not celebrated here when I was a child. However, it has take off in recent years and is popular with children and adults.

I don’t celebrate Halloween but thiught it would be fun to bake a Halloween inspired cake. Looking through my cookbooks, I found Rose Levy Beranbaum’s Pumpkin Cake with Burnt Orange Silk Meringue Buttercream from Heavenly Cakes. It was cute and I had bought pumpkin especially to make a Halloween cake, so I went with it.

The full cake is made in a two piece 3D pumpkin shaped pan and feeds 16! For one person, this could not be justified, so inspired by Rose’s suggestion to bake the cake in a bundt tin, I baked a quarter of the cake recipe in mini bundt tins:

The cake is a pumpkin walnut spice sponge, with cinnamon and nutmeg. These little cakes were easy enough to bake

The painful part was making the buttercream. It is made in three parts - a caramel creme anglaise, an Italian meringue buttercream and finally, the two are beaten together with butter and an orange concentrate (which I had to make). The buttercream is then coloured in two different shades of orange. 

I had to make the creme anglaise twice, as the first attempt was a dismal failure. The second time around, I ditched the thermometer and went with experience in making caramel and creme anglaise instead.

Two mini bundts are joined with buttercream, then the whole lot is iced with buttercream. A small amount of darker orange buttercream is then used to make contrasting stripes in the cake. 

Finally, to make the cake look like a pumpkin, you make a stem and tendril out of marzipan tinted brown by rolling it in cocoa, and hand cut leaves with green tinted buttercream.

It is definitely a labour of love, and I only made one.

My buttercream was not quite right, but it did the job. Taste-wise, I would prefer my usual buttercream, which is also a lot easier to make.

It was fun to do this once, but I won’t be doing it again.

I think the pumpkin bundts would go nicely with cream cheese icing, or warmed up and served with vanilla icecream.

Happy Halloween!