Cake #44 Halloween Pumpkin Cake

What do you do when your almost two year old daughter gets up at 6:00 am on a Saturday? Why you wake up and bake a cake of course! And it was a good thing that I started early too, because this cake took me three hours to make. Besides being one of the more decorative cakes I have had to make so far, because it is a pumpkin cake I had to open up a pumpkin and grate its flesh. Which also meant de-seeding it and cleaning it. And because I have the Dahle blood in me, I couldn't waste the seeds I had to clean the seeds and roast them with butter just like my dad use to do for Halloween. Besides pumpkin flesh the cake called for the usual flour. butter, vanilla, baking powder, and eggs, but also used brown sugar and pumpkin pie spice. And that was only the cake. The icing I had to dye to make it orange, which I did not have any orange dye, so I had to mix red and yellow to make it orange. Then create pumpkins and bats out of the rest of the fondant (I had to dye the fondant for the bats, black), which I think they turned out really well, and my bats have way more detail than the book's bats. Considering I have never carved a bat out of fondant...or really anything before- I think they look great.


Here is my cake with the amazing bats (but the icing on the pumpkins dripped...oh well)

And the book's cake and much more lame bats:

Even though Halloween is on a Monday this year, and it is snowing, yes snowing today, I still have the spirit. I love Halloween- so much so that this weekend coming up Ted and I are going to Salem to do witch hunts and witch museums and grave sites and everything spooky.  Halloween also just happens to be when Ted first asked me out eleven years ago - so what's not to love?