Pumpkin Cake

Sometimes I just need to get rid of the can of pumpkin and some of the ten bags of nuts that have managed to accumulate in my cupboard.  Luckily, the Pumpkin Cake was the perfect thing to get rid of some unused ingredients.



Before starting in on Rose's Heavenly Cakes, I had never realized how much a quick roast in the oven improves the flavor of nuts.  It's really amazing how the flavors are drawn out and made infinitely more delicious after a swift roast.  The walnuts smelled and tasted heavenly after coming out of the oven.



The cake isn't anything very special.  The batter is simple to put together.  Rose's recipe makes use of the Nordic Ware 3D Pumpkin Pan, but I'm cheap and a regular bundt pan does the job just as well.



The buttercream for this came together perfectly, but it somehow began to melt a bit after standing in my kitchen for a few minutes.  It went onto the cake a little...  weird.



I'll be the first to admit that this doesn't look like it's going to taste amazing.  That color is just unappetizing.  Rose adds orange food coloring to her pumpkin-shaped cake, but again, my cheapness prevented me from doing this.



Fortunately, the cake inside was delicious and moist.  The contrast of the light-colored frosting and the darker cake was surprisingly nice to look at.  My only complaints with this cake are that the pumpkin flavor wasn't very strong and that it was a bit too sweet for my taste.  Other than that:  SUCCESS!

Genoise Rose

Only three times in my life have I made something that was so horrible, so disgusting, that I had to straight-up throw it out.  Unfortunately, the Genoise Rose cake was one of those times.  I'm big enough to admit that in two of those instances, the fault lay entirely with me.  I messed up.  My bad.



Everything started several months ago when I made what I optimistically considered a great find at a local Goodwill Store.  A rose-shaped bundt pan for only $8.  Sure the exterior paint looked like crap.  Sure it needed a really good scrub.  But a pan is a pan, right?



Flush with a sense of victory from my amazing find, I went home to try making the beautiful Genoise Rose cake featured in Rose's Heavenly Cakes.

As I poured the batter into the scrubbed and greased pan, I began to have doubts about the provenance of this cheap piece of bakeware.  Someone was probably just moving and didn't need it anymore.  Or a family member died and their kids didn't want it.  Or someone had finally decided to clear out the clutter in their kitchen.  Right?  It couldn't possibly be one of those... cursed pans I've heard so much about?  Right?



Wrong.  The cake fell to pieces in the pan and clung like a needy girlfriend to the center core.  This meant that I had to reach my claws into the cake to pull it out in disgusting chunks.  The resulting cake was... not pretty.  I ventured to sample a bit and found that it was also not tasty.  At all.  It was, in fact, pretty horrible.  So I choked back tears of shame and disappointment and into the garbage it went.

It was only then that I discovered the true curse of this pan; the reason why it had been abandoned at the Goodwill.  The thing is completely impossible to clean.  No human digit is small enough to get into the nooks and crannys of the rose.  No sponge or brush could dislodge every bit of clingy cake.  Even an obsessive scrubbing with a toothbrush couldn't get into every crevasse.  The thing is disgusting and a breeding ground for mold and other living organisms.




A few months later, I decided to make a second attempt at the Genoise Rose, but this time I used a normal bundt pan.  The results were significantly better tasting and just better to look at.



This cake is brushed with a triple-sec syrup to give it an orange-y sweet flavor.  To be honest, this cake could have used a bit more syrup.  The outside was moist and tasty, but the inside was still a little dry.



People still ate it though :)