Halloween Cake Decorating—Pumpkin Cake Part One
In the next couple posts we’re going to tackle our first Halloween cake decorating project and learn how to bake and decorate a cake shaped like a pumpkin.
This cake was made using
the Great Pumpkin Cake Pan
First, you’re going to need to gather the tools and ingredients needed to bake your cake. This cake will be created using two bundt cakes. The first bundt cake will be placed on the bottom (upside-down) while the other is placed on top (right-side up) to create a pumpkin shape. This is a great cake to make for a Halloween party since it contains 24 servings! That’s a lot of cake! 
For this Halloween cake decorating project you can use two 10-inch bundt cake pans or the Great Pumpkin Cake Pan. If you have a fluted bundt pan this will work well because it has the outside appearance of a real pumpkin.
Any cake recipe will do, but it might be nice to go with a flavor that has an autumn theme. For this a brown sugar cake recipe works well such as the one below. This recipe is enough to fill one bundt cake pan. If you have two pans you can double the recipe and divide evenly, otherwise you’ll need to bake one cake at a time.
Gather the following ingredients while your oven preheats to 350 degrees:
3 ¾ cups cake flour
1 ½ teaspoons baking soda
2 ¼ cups vegetable oil
2 ¼ cups dark brown sugar
3 eggs
1 ½ teaspoons pure vanilla extract
1 ½ cups buttermilk
1. Coat all surfaces of your bundt pan with flour baking spray and set aside.
2. Whisk together the cake flour and baking soda in a medium size bowl.
3. With a hand or stand mixer, beat together the vegetable oil and dark brown sugar in large mixing bowl until well combined. Add eggs one at a time and mix until blended. Blend in vanilla.
4. Add your flour mixture to the oil and sugar in four increments and alternate with the buttermilk. So it will be flour, buttermilk, flour, buttermilk, flour, buttermilk, flour. When you add each addition of flour, mix until just blended. You don’t want to over mix otherwise your cake will taste too chewy.
5. Pour the batter in your bundt pan and bake for around 50 minutes. Make sure to test the cake with something long enough to reach the bottom of your cake, like a bamboo skewer or meat thermometer. When it comes out with just a few crumbs attached—the cake is ready. If it comes out clean—you cake will probably taste too dry.
6. Let the cake rest in the pan on an oven rack for at least 10 minutes before inverting to finish the cooling process.
In our next blog post we’ll cover more cake decorating tips and finish our series on Halloween cake decorating and learn how to decorate our pumpkin cake.
