Are you in charge of dessert at your Thanksgiving feast this year? Are you trying to decide between a pumpkin, and apple, or a pecan pie for dessert? Considering the bold choice of making a cake, instead?
I'd like to make a suggestion.
Why not make all of the above? Why not serve up an apple pie, a pumpkin pie and a pecan pie, each baked inside a different flavor of cake, then stacked on top of each other and slathered with frosting?
Inspired by a ridiculous blog post that made the rounds on social media last year, I put together this
excellent dessert to share with my Ann Arbor News and MLive colleagues, and to bring
a giant amount of holiday cheer into the office.
In order to make this easier, my "recipe" calls for store-bought pies, cake mix and canned frosting. But really - whipping together some delicious, homemade frosting won't take you much extra time, and it will make this cake a whole lot more palatable. In fact, here's a recipe for cream cheese frosting that would work nicely on this cake - you'll just want to triple it.
A few recipe notes:
You'll be tempted to completely submerge the pies in cake batter before you bake them. Don't do it. You'll end up with cake batter all over the bottom of your oven. Don't ask me how I know.
I used frosting in a can for the first time since junior high school, but it's pretty easy to make your own cream cheese frosting. Just know that you will need a lot of frosting to frost this giant, three-layer pie-cake.
If you don't have easy access to fresh 8-inch pies (I bought mine at Kroger), you can usually find them in the freezer section. Just make sure to allow enough extra time to bake and cool the frozen pies.
Don't be tempted to bake the pies from scratch -- your homemade pie will have less structural integrity, and they would be quite challenging to remove from their pie plates intact.
You'll want to invite a lot of friends over to share this with you. It's big. Almost unwieldy. I brought mine in to the Ann Arbor News news room, where it was met with a mixture of skepticism and horror. I understood. I shared those feelings.
But once my colleagues dug in, that skepticism turned to enthusiasm.
The Pumplecan
- inspired by a recipe from Charles Phoenix
1 8-inch pecan pie
1 8-inch pumpkin pie
1 8-inch apple pie
1 box chocolate cake mix
1 box spice cake mix
1 box yellow cake mix
Eggs and oil or butter, as indicated on cake mix boxes
5 tall tubs of cream cheese frosting
3 9-inch round cake pans
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.
Liberally apply butter or non-stick spray on the cake pans.
Make the cake batters according to the instructions on the box.
Take the chocolate cake batter and pour approximately one-third of it in the bottom of the first cake pan. Remove the pecan pie from its pie tin and carefully settle it, right-side-up, in the batter. Add just enough batter to cover the top of the pie.
Repeat the process for the pumpkin pie with the spice cake and the apple pie with the yellow cake.
Bake the cakes for 35 to 40 minutes, then let cool completely before frosting.
When assembling your Pumplecan, it's a good idea to put the heaviest pie/cake on the bottom layer. (In my case, the layer with the apple pie was the heaviest.)
Carefully tip the pie/cake onto a cake stand or large plate, right-side up. Frost liberally, then repeat with the next two layers.
Take photos. Post them on Facebook and Instagram. Then enjoy!