Tag: pumpkin cake

The best pumpkin cake you’ll ever try! With warm spices and an insanely moist and soft texture, you’ll want a slice of this fall cake every day of the year! This pumpkin cake, packed with pure pumpkin flavour, is so easy to make, you can have it out of the oven in just over an hour! Keep reading to find out how!

The Story Behind the Cake:

Last year, I knew I wanted to make a pumpkin cake for Halloween. I wanted it to have the perfect texture, taste, and overall flavour to fully embody the fall and Halloween spirit. So, since I had successfully developed the absolute BEST apple cake recipe (Cinnamon Apple Cider Loaf Cake), I was hoping I could convert it to a pumpkin cake by subbing out the apple reduction for pumpkin puree.

Unfortunately, I was wrong. The cake turned out a bit too dense for my liking, so I knew I had to try something different.

A Treasure was Found:

Luckily for me though, I went searching through my family’s recipe box and found this recipe. I don’t know who we got it from, but it must have been some family friend who wanted us to try it. And so I did try it.

For Halloween this year, I followed the recipe-box-recipe to make the cake layers of my Halloween Cake (check out the Gallery to see the finished cake!). Before it was even in the oven, I fell in love with the recipe. Why? Because it is seriously so easy to make!! It’s a 2 bowl recipe, where you just mix ingredients together, then mix those bowls together. Don’t tell any other baking bloggers this, but you could probably skip the step with whisking the dry ingredients first and make it a one bowl recipe instead if you want it even easier (or are like me and hate washing extra dishes!).

Once the cake came out of the oven though, I was even more in love. The second I cut into it to level off the domes, I knew it was going to be the softest cake ever. And I was right.

I bet you thought the texture couldn’t get any better. But it does; on top of the softness, you get something even more important when it comes to cake texture: the moistness. My apologies for using that word, but this cake is seriously so moist!!! It is quite literally melt-in-your-mouth, can-hear-the-moisture-if-you-press-on-it moist. AKA: the. Best. Texture. Ever.

After finding that amazing recipe, the only thing I did was slightly tweak some flavours to get it absolutely perfect, and there you have it folks: the BEST Pumpkin Cake!

How to Make the Best Pumpkin Cake:

As I said above, this recipe is super simple, so let’s take a deeper look at exactly how simple.

Dry Ingredients:

You start by whisking together your dry ingredients: the flour, baking powder and baking soda (your leavening agents to make it tall and fluffy), and all of your spices. This includes salt, cinnamon, nutmeg, and a bit of ginger, but you could also add in some allspice, pumpkin spice (which is essentially just the above spices already mixed together), or any other spice that you would want it your pumpkin cake!

Wet Ingredients:

Then, you mix the wet ingredients in the bowl of an electric mixer. I prefer using my Kitchenaid Stand Mixer since it’s really easy and efficient, but you could also use a hand mixer if you prefer. The wet ingredients include the sugar, pumpkin puree, oil, eggs, and vanilla extract.

After you mix these together for a few minutes, it should look like a thinner consistency batter. This is the only point in the process where you can beat the batter for longer since as you mix, air gets incorporated.

When flour mixes with liquids, gluten starts to form and this process is accelerated with the addition of air. So once you add your flour, you don’t want to mix for too long since the longer you mix, the more air that gets incorporated and the more gluten that’s developed, which results in a denser cake. However, before adding in the flour, no harm is done by mixing forever, so feel free to beat for those few extra minutes to get it even fluffier!

Mixing & Baking:

Finally, as you probably anticipated, you then add in the dry ingredients. Mix these together until just combined as explained above.

Pour the batter into your cake pans (if you are not planning on using the 6″ round 3″ tall pans that I used, see the recipe notes for suggestions on other pan sizes) and bake at 350 for almost an hour. Then, once the cakes are done, the toothpick has only a few moist crumbs, and your house smells like pumpkin spice heaven, take them out of the oven and let them cool.

Pairing the Best Pumpkin Cake:

Since pumpkin spice lattes are a fall staple and such an iconic flavour pairing, I frosted this Pumpkin Cake with an Espresso Spice Buttercream. The recipe for that frosting is here: http://Espresso Spice Frosting and it goes so perfectly with the Pumpkin Cake. It brings out all of the right sweet and spicy flavours and is so reminiscent of a coffee run to Starbucks.

However, if pumpkin spice lattes are not your thing, you could pair this cake with a vanilla buttercream, cream cheese frosting, or practically anything else you want! I’m not a huge fan of chocolate and pumpkin together, but some people are, so if that’s your thing go ahead and frost it with chocolate buttercream! Other great frosting flavours you could play around with are brown sugar, caramel, maple and more!

If you give this recipe a try, don’t forget to leave a review below. Enjoy!