The Return of Sunday Sweets Blogging: Pumpkin Spice Cake with Dulce de Leche Frosting

While my blogging schedule has suffered a massive lapse, I didn’t give up my habit of baking on Sunday evening and bringing the results into work on Monday morning.

Appropriately for the season, last Sunday’s baking effort was a pumpkin sheet cake, iced with a quick caramel buttercream made with a cup of dulce de leche. Although it’s readily available in specialty stores these days (unlike my childhood when it required a visit by relatives from the southern hemisphere), in the event that you can’t locate dulce de leche or its Mexican equivalent, cajeta, you could easily forego frosting the cake and simply dust it with powdered sugar instead.

With or without the frosting, the cake is moist, spicy and a snap to put together.

Pumpkin Spice Cake
2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
1 1/2 teaspoons pumpkin pie spice
1 1/2 chai spice powder (see Notes)
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 3/4 cups packed light brown sugar
4 large eggs
1/2 cup sunflower seed or nut oil
1/2 cup grapeseed or canola oil
1 15 oz can solid-pack pumpkin

Preheat oven to 350°F.

Grease and line with parchment paper or nonstick foil a 13- by 9- by 2-inch baking pan.

In a medium bowl, whisk together flour, spices, baking soda, and salt.

In a large bowl, whisk together brown sugar and eggs in a large bowl until sugar is fully incorporated, with no lumps. Whisk in the oil and pumpkin purée and combine thoroughly. Add flour mixture and whisk just until smooth.
Pour batter into baking pan and bake in middle of oven until springy to the touch and a tester inserted in center comes out clean, 30 to 40 minutes.

Cool on a rack for 10 minutes, then run a knife around edge and invert onto rack. Peel off paper and cool cake completely.

Spread top of cake with dulce de leche frosting (see below) and chill thoroughly to set before serving.

Dulce de Leche Frosting
1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter, at room temperature but still firm
1 cup dulce de leche
1 cup powdered sugar
1 tablespoon vanilla paste or extract
Generous pinch of salt
1-2 tbsp half and half

Whip butter in standing mixer for 30 seconds to lighten, then add dulce de leche and sugar and beat until light and fluffy, approximately 1-2 minutes. Beat in vanilla and salt, then add sufficient half and half to thin to a spreadable consistency.

Notes:

The chai spice powder idea comes from the inventive Chockylit at Cupcake Bakeshop and has been great fun to use ever since I discovered it. If you don’t want to bother, the equivalent amount of pumpkin pie spice, apple pie spice, or extra cinnamon, ginger, allspice and cloves in proportion to your taste is easily substituted.

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Pie? Meh, but Cupcakes I Can Get Behind.

We never had pumpkin pie for Thanksgiving when I was growing up. While my mother adopted Thanksgiving with a vengeance when she first discovered it as an immigrant, her nearly-wholesale appropriation stopped short of the dessert course. She never cared for pumpkin pie, probably because she dislikes cloves and allspice, so we usually had some variation on apple pie (pie, strudel, even tarte tatin) instead. As an adult, though, I’ve thrown off my mother’s aversion to the spices usually found in pie, and I’ve also become really fond of pumpkin as a dessert medium, although pie is still not my favorite use for it, partly because really good pie dough without hydrogenated fat is my personal demon and constant nemesis, and partly because there are so many more interesting possibilities for pumpkin.

For the past few years, I’ve been alternating between the flan/creme brulee end and the cake ends of the spectrum. This year, I decided to follow the example of the very inventive Chockylit at Cupcake Bakeshop, because, in addition to being cute, leftover cupcakes would be much easier to take to work than a partially-consumed cake. I used the same recipe for the cakes, but I’m just not convinced by the combination of pumpkin and chocolate. I opted for a mascarpone and cream cheese frosting instead, based on a recipe I’d seen on Everyday Italian (yeah, she’s annoying, but at least she does have a legitimate grounding in terms of both training and Italian cuisine). The results were both yummy and attractive, although next time I might double the amount of frosting, since there was only enough to cover eighteen cupcakes, and not particularly generously, either.

I won’t re-post the cupcake recipe, since I didn’t modify it at all (although it made twenty-four rather than thirty in my muffin tins, probably because I always resist underfilling the cups), but I’ll post the frosting recipe, since I added vanilla and since the Food Network pulls recipes after a while.

Mascarpone Cream Cheese Frosting
Makes enough to lightly frost 18 cupcakes

3 oz cream cheese
3/4 stick (6 tablespoons) unsalted butter
1/3 cup mascarpone cheese
3 tablespoons honey
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Let the cheeses and butter come to room temperature, then beat together the cream cheese and butter until light and fluffy. Beat in the mascarpone until combined, then the honey and vanilla extract.

Chill until firm.

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