Pumpkin Layered Cake

A few days ago, I made a mini-coffee Swiss roll cake for my uncle and since then, I've tried to make 2 more roll cakes and I still have not found a recipe that will yield a perfect, regular-sized roll cake. You would think that if rolling a mini-sized roll cake is easy, then a regular-sized one wouldn't be much more difficult. Wrong. The past two cakes have cracked when I rolled the cake, even when I rolled it when the cake was warm... Oh well, one of these days I'll find a recipe or figure out the secret to assembling a Swiss roll... Since the roll was unsuccessful, I just stacked the cakes to make a layered cake. Here's the recipe to the pumpkin roll cake I mentioned in the previous post: http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/ina-garten/pumpkin-roulade-with-ginger-buttercream-recipe/index.html 

And here's a picture of my pumpkin layered cake: 

The cake itself is very good though, fluffy and moist. I just whipped up some heavy cream with sugar for the filling/topping instead of making the filling in the original recipe. Since the spices are so strong in the cake already, I thought a simple cream would be a nice touch. But of course, it all depends on your tastes! 

Pumpkin Bread

Okay, last post of the day: I made pumpkin bread and pumpkin cake today. Somehow, my family amassed 5 small/medium-sized pumpkins randomly. We were supposedly going to make pumpkin soup with them but that plan never worked out and in the end, I was given the task of using them before they began to rot. I just cut the pumpkins into small pieces/wedges and roasted them without any seasoning in a 350°F oven for around 45 minutes. When I could use a fork to mash the pumpkin, I took them out and puréed all of it in a food processor. The result: pure pumpkin purée. I used about 2 cups of the purée to slather on top of cooked pizza dough to make a pumpkin "pizza" and that was dinner for one night. Today, I used the rest of the purée and the recipe for the pumpkin bread can be found here: http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/pumpkin-bread-recipe/index.html

I cut the original recipe in half to make one loaf and used about 1 cup of sugar instead of the original 1 1/2 cups. In addition, I used 1/2 tsp nutmeg, 1/2 tsp cinnamon, and 1/2 tsp ginger powder in place of the spices used in the recipe. The resulting pumpkin bread had a flavor similar to pumpkin pie so I was quite satisfied.

More on the pumpkin cake will be posted tomorrow or later!