There is nothing better than eating a slice of cake for lunch. Decadent, naughty, frosting covered cake…it goes down much more pleasurably than light salads don’t you think? What makes the cake even better is when it comes from your oven, via your lovingly made hands and is filled with all the wonderful flavors that fall has to offer. What’s even better in this particular instance is when the cake doesn’t look like it should taste very good, but it does. Here we have the essence of the Grey Pumpkin Cake.
Today is Halloween!!! The kids will be out in full force in a mere couple of hours, donning their most frightening (and not so frightening) getups, going from house to house exclaiming trick or treat at the tops of their lungs in the hopes of filling up bags and plastic jack-o-lanterns full to capacity with cavity inducing commercial treats. Gone are the days of caramelizing and candying apples in your kitchen or making sweet balls of popcorn to hand out. In fact, those days were gone when I was a kid. It’s that pesky legend about the razor in the apple that got everyone riled up, and with good reason.
It’s a fitting day for Halloween. The wind is blowing strong and chilly. The leaves have been ripped off most of the trees leaving them bare and claw-like, grappling to hang on to the last few precious burgundy and brown decorations before going completely naked for the winter. I like it when the day fits the mood and the time, I mean, there is nothing worse than either a warm October 31st, or one with snow on the ground. The wind makes everything creak and gives a haunted sense to the neighborhood street helped out by inspired neighbors with cobwebs and creatures on their porches and flowerbeds turned into graveyards. Halloween gives adults an opportunity to be a kid nearly as much as Christmas.
In honor of the day I decided to take a trip to the cemetery…that most maudlin and obvious choices for a day such as this. I traveled to Sleepy Hollow Cemetery last year in search of Ichabod and the Headless Horsemen, but today I merely went for a walk down the street. We live only a couple moments walk form Dale Cemetery, a very large and historic gravesite in Ossining. The road I live on dead ends right near the gates (a little creepy, yes) and I enjoy going for a stroll there from time to time to clear my head. That may sound a little morose, but I’m usually guaranteed peace and quite with very few living people to deal with.
The cemetery was even quieter today because it was closed off for some road construction, but I walked a little further down past the gates and into a nearby park. Near the swing-set runs a small creek, which separates the neighborhood park from the land the cemetery sits on. We’ve had very little rain and the creek was low, so after a hop skip and a jump over the rocks I was in!
That strong wind was bringing down more and more leaves left and right. They crinkled along the paths with each passing gust and shot out over the hilly landscape falling into windswept piles around the bases of trees and rocks. I love the sound of walking through the leaves, the crinkling, crunchy sound that kicks up that all too familiar smell I keep writing about. The only sound other than the wind and leafy crunch were the squirrels. They were busy hopping from oak to oak, knocking down branches and digging acorns into the ground where they would be able to find them later in the colder months.
The stones in this cemetery are quite old dating as far back as the 1700’s. On top of a steep hill not far from the gates reside the oldest makers and mausoleums, surrounded by giant maples and firs. Here the wind is the strongest, blowing with a sense of dread, urging the living to get out and go somewhere else, especially on All Hallows Eve. Undaunted I moved through the woodsy gravesite, snapping photos and feeling quite peaceful. I always enjoy a good scare and a bit of spooky atmosphere. It has a feeling like coming home.
After returning home from Dale, I wanted to get to work on my cake photography while the sun was still at a good place in the sky. This week’s cake was inspired by two very important things, a) It’s the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown, and b) grey pumpkins.
I remember writing last year, albeit briefly, about grey pumpkins. I have mentioned them from time to time and I have a passion for them. Every year, toward the end of September they start to show up at the farmer’s markets. I think they are technically a “blue” pumpkin, but they look grey to me and I absolutely adore them. Grey is one of my favorite colors (if you can call it that) and has been for years. It’s the neutral that keeps on giving and can pick up bounced color from almost any object. Grey can look slightly green or red depending on the light, and we have slowly been painting the rooms in our house varying shades of this most user-friendly and contemporary color.
Grey goes with anything and that means pumpkins as well as cakes. Maybe I like the pumpkins for their traditional reference, but the contemporary color elevates them into something different, more akin to sculpture than just an ordinary jack-o-lantern in waiting. Don’t get me wrong, I love the orange traditional pumpkins…I’m as traditional as it gets, but when it comes to a modern update for your holidays, I say grey pumpkins (and grey frosting) are the way to go.
The other inspiration I mentioned was Charles Schultz’ beloved classic from 1966, It’s the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown. This is one of those shows I remember loving as a kid and I couldn’t wait for it to come on. It meant Halloween and candy was right around the corner. It has all the makings of everything a kid could want…cartoon kids in costumes, candy, pumpkins, WWII flying ace in the guise of Snoopy, wait, what??? Yea, that’s what I said when I watched it again.
It must be twenty years or so since I sat down to watch this cartoon, and it is so different from what I remembered. Truthfully I don’t remember much other than Linus waiting in the pumpkin patch for the Great Pumpkin to show up, but it’s funny that I didn’t remember that he/she never comes.
I’m not altogether sure what the message is. Are we supposed to believe in something we can’t see regardless of what other people think, a.k.a. a very Christian sort of mentality, or are we supposed to think Linus is a fool because all the other kids went out and had fun all night with no consequences? I obviously don’t have an answer to this one nor am I making any moral judgments about it, I just don’t remember it being that way, and I also didn’t remember the endless segment of Snoopy flying on top of his house while being fired at as if he’s in World War II.
The funny thing is, though, that I was still left with that happy Halloween/fall feeling I used to have while watching it as a kid. Maybe that’s the point, the feeling and impression you are left with as opposed to the specific story. I think Charles Schultz was going for something deeper, quite possibly, but I’m happy just to look at Charlie Brown trying to kick the old football while Lucy pulls it away.
Having said all of that, now you can understand a little more where I was coming from with this week’s dessert (or hopefully you can). I wanted something pumpkin for Halloween and autumn, and with grey pumpkins being my favorite I decided to make a pumpkin cake recipe I found in the November 2010 Martha Stewart Living and shake things up a bit by making a grey frosting. Grey frosting you say??? Disgusting you say??? Ahhh…but no. It’s is a pumpkin cake in disguise, a Halloween cake if you will wearing a color scheme not thought of as appetizing, but once you taste it you will completely change your mind…I hope.
The pumpkin cake itself is a very straightforward cake recipe where one of the ingredients happens to be our old friend the canned pumpkin. I thought about roasting some small sugar pumpkins but I didn’t really have that kind of time on my hands. And a point of fact, I like canned pumpkin. I was raised with canned pumpkin. Heck, we were all raised with Libby’s canned pumpkin. It’s what we know, what we are used to and what we like and far be it from me to break that part of the holiday tradition.
The cake is full of cinnamon, freshly grated nutmeg and ginger and I added a 1/4-teapsoon of allspice to add that little extra punch of spice flavor I like in a cake, pie or quick-bread. I also added and extra 1/2-teaspoon of salt to the recipe to balance out all the sweet ingredients. This cake gets made in two 8-inch buttered and floured cakes pans and baked at 350 degrees for 35 minutes or so, until a toothpick comes out clean when you pierce them and the cakes have started to pull away from the sides of the pans.
The frosting is the fun part. The cake recipe in the magazine calls for a cream cheese and goat cheese frosting, but I’m not a big fan of goat cheese. What I am a big fan of is butter, and buttercream more specifically. I had seen another recipe (while online doing a pumpkin recipe related search) that was a similar pumpkin cake that had a brown butter frosting. I thought to myself what could be better than a brown buttercream/cream cheese frosting? Nothing. It is amazing…especially when you turn it grey.
I sort of melded the two recipes and came up with this:
Grey Browned Butter Cream Cheese Frosting:
12 oz cream cheese (a block and a half)
1 stick of browned butter (cooked in a skillet over medium-high heat for 5 or so minutes until amber colored, then poured through a strainer to get rid of any solids. Chill for a few minutes.)
1/2 stick of room temperature butter
1 1/2-Cups confectioner’s sugar
1-tablespoon vanilla extract or paste
10-20 drops of black food coloring (to desired grey color)
Combine all of these things in a kitchen aid or use a hand mixer. Blend with a paddle attachment for about 5 minutes on medium-high or until the frosting is light and spreadable and a lovely cement grey color.
All you have to do is take your two cakes and sandwich them together with a layer of frosting in the middle, then just cover the stacked cake with the remaining buttercream. I went for a smooth, stone-like finish, but you could take a lot of liberties with this and do some interesting patterns with your offset spatula (or whatever you are using to spread on your icing). With the clean slate look, I was able to dress it up with some bittersweet branches from out in the garden and a cute little white pumpkin I found at Grand Central market the other day.
Ding Dong!!! Trick or Treat!!! Wow, it’s only 4:30 and the kids have started coming. I guess they get out a little earlier these days? I never wanted to go out until it was dark, but I guess with younger kids maybe it’s a safety thing. Well that’s good, though, I would hate to have to eat all the bags of candy myself if no one came along to ring our doorbell. I don’t have the willpower to have candy just lying around the house. It’s time to get the spooky music going (the theme from John Carpenter’s Halloween and Psycho) mingled with other horror movie favorites, light up the candles, turn the porch light blue and prepare for the general madness and mayhem which this night provides.
I did want to quickly share one other recipe that I made last week still with the intention of honoring fall and the apple, and one that I think will be a great way to use up any remaining apples you may have left sitting in a bowl on your kitchen counter. They are called Apple Currant Cookies, but I couldn’t find any currants at the market last week so they became Apple and Dried Cherry Cookies. I was watching an old episode of Martha Stewart Living (as I am want to do on a lazy Sunday afternoon) and she made these cookies, which are really quite a bit like oatmeal raisin cookies, just given an update with both freshly grated apples and homemade apple butter.
Now I didn’t take the time to make apple butter as a good devotee of Martha should be doing, but I had purchased a jar at the apple orchard a couple of weeks ago and it was sitting around doing nothing more than filling up my limited pantry space. What really excited me about these cookies, other than all the apples in the batter was the dried apple chip that goes on top for decoration. You slice 2-3 apples very thinly (this is most easily accomplished with a mandolin) in a crosswise fashion. You don’t even need to core them because the seed and core shape left in the thin chips look almost like a flower (which I found to be pretty). As you bake the cookies, the apple slices dry out and adhere to the top giving a rather strange and almost sand-dollar like impression.
It’s almost like these cookies are wearing a mask, so they would work for a Halloween party buffet or for just an average fall or potentially Thanksgiving sideboard treat. Paired with the Grey Pumpkin Cake and a good old fashioned Bloody Mary, you’ve got a Halloween party on your hands people will be raving about…. in a mental asylum because they just couldn’t handle the way the grey frosting made them feel.
If I were to be honest, I have mixed feelings about Halloween. It’s something I love to decorate for but am not apt to dress up in general. I’m not sure why that is exactly, maybe because it’s scary enough just being myself most of the time. What I do like to see are the excited kids in the neighborhood cautiously walking up our front steps, almost daring themselves (with their parents coaching in the background) to get a piece of candy (or two or three) and walking away proud of their haul. Taking home and eating a lot of sugar never gets old in my opinion.
So for tonight, I will listen to the ominous music blaring from our window (now the theme to The Shining and Jaws), hand out goodies, take a trip over to The Great Jack-O-Lantern Blaze at Van Cortland Manner to look at carved jack-o-lantern sculptures and return home to watch a scary movie or two. AMC has been playing a Michael Myers Halloween marathon since I got up…and I love them for it. Whether you are out for tricks or treats tonight, have a frighteningly good time and don’t eat any razorblade apples. Though ghosts and goblins abound, I think there are probably a few good witches and disco divas out there too. Those are the one’s I want to hang out with. It’s just who I am.
What a fun, fantastic blog! The grey cake looks amazing!
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