Saturday, October 24, 2009

Fall Baking: Pumpkin Spice Cake with Honey Frosting

This was the runner-up in the last poll we posted to help us choose what to bake. And this recipe from Martha Stewart is a winner. This is a dense cake that isn’t too sweet with a decent frosting made of butter, cream cheese, and honey. This is the easiest frosting every- no sifting and hardly any measuring. I can’t wait to try it on cupcakes! Justin thinks we should up the sugar content in both the cake and frosting but I liked it as is.


Similar to the pumpkin bar recipe, this cake starts with the usual dry ingredients including the familiar characters in pumpkin pie spice: allspice, cinnamon, ginger, cloves, and nutmeg.


Because the butter is melted, you don’t need an electric mixer for the batter. There’s something nice about stirring by hand that I appreciate. This cake takes two eggs, pumpkin, sugar and melted butter which get blended with the dry ingredients. You can put this batter in a loaf pan or a square pan or probably most any shape. I chose square.


Now it did take a bit of time to bake and it cracked on top- but that’s what it took for this cake to be fully cooked.


The honey frosting is marvelously indulgent. Once the cake is fully cooled, mix a package of cream cheese ( yes, the full fat one) with a stick of butter and a quarter cup of honey.


I used the electric mixer to whip this up even though Martha says to stir. I think the mixer is better to whip some air into this and make sure there are no lumps. I also didn’t let the cream cheese come to room temp so it was a bit stiff. The mixer did a fantastic job.



And the result…yummy. Again, this isn’t as sweet and pumpkin pie like as the bars from last week. This is spicy, dense and rich. Perfect with a cup of coffee or tea. You can see the pretty uniform texture with tiny bubbles.


Definitely worth a bake!