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