If you’re looking for a cold weather cake that’s light and lovely and spiked with fresh flavors, our Roasted Pumpkin Spice Cake is the real deal! Born from vintage recipes that have been adjusted to reduce the heavy spice load, we’re roasting fresh pumpkin for that hand-crafted  punch. Serve this aromatic delight at brunch for a sensual snacking cake or kick it up a big notch with a drizzle of decadent Pumpkin-Orange Cream Cheese Frosting! Let the cherished holiday celebrations begin with a nice old-fashioned Autumn scratch cake!

I can assure you that during the Fall, Autumn and Winter months, you’ll find canned pumpkin puree in my cupboards for Thanksgiving pumpkin pies or maybe some pumpkin cheesecake for the holiday dessert buffet.  With the dutiful exception of carving pumpkins with the kids for Halloween jack-o-lanterns, I can’t say that I enjoy cleaning out giant piles of stringy-sticky pumpkin innards! 😀 But I now realize that I’ve been clueless — ’cause I had no idea that it could be so easy to cook with fresh pumpkin — using one simple pumpkin trick that I’m going to share with you. Read on fooding hipsters, country cooks and urban homemakers alike. I’m about to make your busy lives a little easier while upping your gastronomity. (Okay, just made that one up!) 😀

Food Writers’ Pumpkin Party! I’m honored to be hooked up with an amazing group of food writers from Food Bloggers Los Angeles (FBLA). Founded by Erika Penzer Kerekes of In Ericka’s Kitchen and Dorothy Reinhold of Shockingly Delicious, members include: Cathy Arkle of ShePausedForThought, Nancy Rose Eisman of Adventures With Nancy Rose and Melissa’s Produce, Patti Londre of Worth The Whisk and Camp Blogaway, Andrew Wilder of Eating Rules, Torri Avey of The Shiksa in the Kitchen, PR guru Jeremy Pepper of @jspepper and Greg Henry of Sippity Sup  (check out his new book Savory Pies).

These are just some of the fine folks that gather every month to share their passion for food and to help each other through the maze of blogger adventures. They share photography and technology tips with encouragement and information all along the blogger highway. In fact, I think I’d be clueless-in-LA without their guidance.

This month its a Pumpkin Party for the FBLA writers — so we gather up at the home of Rashmi Bansal (author of 4 bestselling books on entrepreneurship in India and her blog Youth Curry) to share our favorite pumpkin recipes.

And you can find ALL the food bloggers’ awesome pumpkin recipes in one spot by clicking the froggie symbol (it opens in a new window):

I tried to gather a sample of each dish on my plate. How’s this for one amazing buffet plate of pumpkin flavors? 🙂

Testing an Awesome Bundt Pan! Although you can use your favorite vintage 10-cup bundt pan (or even an angel food tube pan), we’re testing the King Arthur Flour’s Swirl  Bundt Pan sent to us from our sponsor, King Arthur Flour. After using it for baking this cake, I’m putting it on my list of all-time favorite baking products. Yeah, it totally rocks! You can see from the photos that it turns out a really cool cake design but the best part is that it’s nice and heavy with heat-reflective sides that help with stable temperature and an even cake color. It’s made by family owned and operated Nordic Ware (founded in 1946)– and it comes with a lifetime warranty!

Okay, here’s the pumpkin secret!

Yes, I think I’ve discovered the secret weapon in the fight against cleaning out messy pumpkins — and it might open your world to the amazing fresh flavor of real deal pumpkins!

The secret is… (or maybe everyone but me knew this before) – BABY PUMPKINS!  Oh yes! Little mini moms straight from the pumpkin patch!

But why would small pumpkins be the key to this whole fresh pumpkin thing? For one thing — they’re small. Hello! About the size of a cantaloupe will do ya! And they’re easy to handle. Very! Can you easily slice a cantaloupe in half? Yeah, I thought so. And they don’t take much time to scrape clean. Just a few minutes, in fact – for real!

The one I used is not much taller than my coffee mug…

And, in our case, just one bitty 1-1/2 pound pumpkin produced the perfect quantity of pumpkin puree to make about 1-1/2 cups. So that’ll do us for a fine homemade Roasted Pumpkin Spice Cake and an interesting Pumpkin-Orange Cream Cheese Frosting to go with it.

Fresh roasted pumpkin puree with no preservatives, no artificial flavors, no false colors, with very little hassle coming right up.

Ba-zing! 😀

Vintage Roasted Pumpkin Spice Cake: We’ve broken down the ingredients list for you to see clearly that this is really just a simple homemade cake made with creamed butter and sugar, a couple of eggs and some milk blended with flour and holiday spices.

Tools Need for Pumpkin Spice Cake:
Baking pan (I used a glass pie plate, just large enough to hold your halved pumpkin)
Knife & large spoon (for cutting, cleaning & removing fresh pumpkin)
Food processor (or potato masher or fork, for pureed cooked pumpkin)
10-cup Bundt Pan (or tube pan aka angel food pan)
2 Large mixing bowls (one for dry ingredients, one for the main event batter)
Electric Mixer
Spatula
Measuring cups and spoons

Ingredients for Pumpkin Spice Cake:

Pumpkin Puree Ingredients:
1 cup roasted (baked) fresh pumpkin
3 Tablespoons heavy cream (up to 1/4 cup, adjusted as needed)
1 Tablespoon sugar

Dry Ingredients:
2-1/2 cups cake flour
2-1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2  teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon ground ginger
1/2 teaspoon ground cloves
1/2 teaspoon allspice
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

Wet Batter Ingredients:
1/2 cup unsalted butter
1 cup granulated sugar
2 large eggs
1/4 cup of milk (2% is fine)

1. Prepping a Cute Mini Pumpkin:

Let’s prep the pumpkin first. It takes about 45 minutes until the pumpkin tests soft with a fork the same way a baked potato tests soft with a fork — going for tender.

Cut a small pumpkin (about 1-1/2 pounds) in half, scoop out the center seeds and, using a spoon, scrape the inside of the pumpkin clean.

Place each half of the pumpkin on a baking dish (I used a glass pie pan for some reason) and bake at 350 for about 45 minutes until a fork inserted into the pumpkin meat shows juices and the pumpkin is tender enough to mash into a soft puree.
Tip: Leave the oven set to 350 if you will be baking the cake next up.

Using a large spoon, scrape the cooked pumpkin from the skin, discarding the skin.

Using a food processor (or potato masher or fork), puree the pumpkin until smooth, adding:
3 Tablespoons of heavy cream (or up to 1/4 cup heavy cream)
1 Tablespoon sugar
Tip: Blend or mash with cream until puree is thick and smooth — similar to Grandma’s silky mashed potatoes.

Reserve some pumpkin puree: Be sure to save 1/3 cup of the pumpkin puree for a fun pumpkin frosting.

2.  Prepping the Bundt Pan for use:

If you want to be certain your cake slides free from the bundt pan after it is baked, you will coat it with a light slather of non-salted vegetable shortening and then a light dusting of flour.
Tip: Even though you can spray bundt pans with unsalted vegetable spray that contains flour, I’m not taking any chances since it would be very sad if the cake didn’t turn out from the bundt pan mold with even a hint of damage.

3. Prepping the dry ingredients:

In a large mixing bowl, whisk together well the following ingredients and set aside:
2-1/2 cups cake flour
2-1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2  teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon ground ginger
1/2 teaspoon ground cloves
1/2 teaspoon allspice
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

4. Prepping the wet ingredients:

Using an electric mixer, in a large mixing bowl, beat on high-speed for about 1 minute:
1/2 cup unsalted butter

Beat into the creamed butter on high-speed for about 1 to 2 minutes:
1 cup granulated sugar

Beat into the butter-sugar mixture for about 1 to 2 minutes:
2 large eggs
Tip: I like to fork beat my eggs and dribble them into the whirling blender.

Beat into the batter on high-speed for about 1 minute:
the prepared pureed pumpkin mixture
1/4 cup milk (2% is fine)

Add into the batter in portions and beat on medium-speed until well blended (about 1 minute):
the prepared mixed dry ingredients

Using a spatula or spoon, scrape the batter into the prepared bundt pan and smooth the top evenly with a spatula or back of a spoon.

Bake at 350 degrees on the center rack for about 35 minutes until the center tests clean using a toothpick or the internal cake temperature is about 195 degrees.
Tip: The oven should be pre-heated so I just left it on after baking the pumpkin.

Let the cake cool in the pan for about 10 minutes before turning it out on a wire rack to cool thoroughly (about an hour).
Tip: I treat my hot cakes just like I treat fresh bread from the oven — by covering  them with a clean dish towel — since leaving them in the open air might dry them out and covering them with plastic wrap while they’re warm prevents cooling and traps steam.

Fresh Orange-Pumpkin Cream Cheese Orange Frosting: This is a fun hint-of-orange frosting that is rather decadent to add some zest to the old-fashioned pumpkin cake. Although we used meringue powder, if you don’t have it you can substitute powdered sugar. This frosting is for slathering or dribbling so it is not a stiff-peaked frosting.

Tools Needed for Pumpkin Cream Cheese Frosting:
Sifter (for powdered sugar)
Large Mixing Bowl
Electric Mixer
Spatula
Measuring cups and spoons

Ingredients for Pumpkin Cream Cheese Frosting:
3 cups powdered sugar, sifted
1/2 cup butter, unsalted, cold, diced or cubed
4 ounces cream cheese (1/2 of a large cream cheese package)
1/3 cup prepared pumpkin puree (using the above recipe with cream and sugar)
1/3 cup meringue powder
1 teaspoon vanilla extract, fine quality
1/2 teaspoon fresh orange juice
1/2 teaspoon fresh orange zest (outer orange peel, very finely grated)

In a large mixing bowl, add all ingredients at the same time and beat on high-speed for about 5 minutes.

You can put your frosting in a squeeze bottle, as I did, and decorate your bundt cake with wild swirls or add more frosting or frost the entire cake with the frosting. Here’s what it looks like with more frosting run between the folds of the cake…yum-o!

Thank you for joining us on our little adventure with food writers and a walk back in time to re-discover a hand-crafted cake.  I hope you’re Friending us on Facebook –where we share test cakes in progress. Also find us on Twitter (@BakeThisCakecom) and on Pinterest.

Leslie

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• Country Roasted Pumpkin Bread #Recipe – Cooking at the River House (bakethisbread.com)
• Vintage Sour Cream Pound Cake (bakethiscake.com)
• Lizzie’s Homemade Maraschino Cherry Cake (bakethiscake.com)
• One Bowl Cowboy Whiskey Cake (bakethiscake.com)