Alexis here, life has been pretty crazy as of late, but about a week and a half ago Lena, Kiki and I held a pretty awesome Halloween party! Lena and I have been saying that we were going to throw a Halloween party every year but each year we chicken out. This year we decided to let a bunch of people know about it a month or so in advance so we would have to finally see it through. It was really neat that everyone really got involved and made it pretty great. Kiki came down to decorate! My parents sent some delicious wantons and ribs! Lena and I got busy and cooked up a storm. We even carved 4 pumpkins so we could pick out the seeds and roast them. It was also pretty cool to see a bunch of graduate students dressed up in costumes ranging from Galinda the Good Witch (lena), to a penguin and even Schrodinger’s Cat (science geek thing).
One of the many dishes out was a pumpkin cake with cream cheese frosting. This little cake was a given because my mom and dad had gotten me an awesome Halloween cake pan, a few years ago, with the shapes of a jack o’lanterns and ghosts. So my brilliant idea was to make the jack o’lanterns into pumpkin cakes and the ghosts into white cakes. As super cute as that sounds when you only have one pan with three jack o’lanterns on it…it tends to take some time to bake all the cakes. But the 4 hours was definitely worth it because these little guys were tasty!
Pumpkin Cake
Ingredients:
2 ¾ cups all-purpose flour
2 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp ground cloves
1 tsp ginger
1 tsp nutmeg
2 tsp baking soda
2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter
3 cups sugar
3 eggs
2 tsp vanilla
15 oz. (1 can) pumpkin
- Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.
- Sift (gently mix) all the dry ingredients: flour, cinnamon, cloves, ginger, nutmeg, baking soda, baking powder and salt.
- In a separate bowl, with an electric mixer, beat together butter and sugar until it is pale and fluffy. Add the eggs one at a time, beating and scraping down the sides of the bowl after each egg.
- Stir in the vanilla.
- Beat in a third of the flour mixture, followed by ½ the can of pumpkin. Add another third of the flour mixture and the rest of the can of the pumpkin, finishing again with the remaining third of the flour mixture.
- Spoon into either a greased cupcake pan or if you have it, jack o’ lantern molded cake pan! Bake for about 11 minutes or until an inserted toothpick comes out clean.
- After cooling completely on a rack, either frost the cupcakes or slice the jack o’ lanterns in half with a serrated knife and sandwich in the cream cheese frosting.
Again this was a pretty tasty recipe and the jack o’ lantern cake sandwiches were a perfect dessert for a Halloween party. Though with Thanksgiving coming up this recipe would also be a great alternative to the standard pumpkin pie! Have fun with it!