Bake 52 Week 41: Pumpkin Sheet Cake

Do you ever get bored?  Not just bored but so bored that nothing you do breaks the boredom??  I'm feeling like I'm there...  So that may have colored my opinion of this recipe, so I'd take my opinion with a grain of salt. 

It's a very simple cake recipe...  Blend the dry ingredients first.

Don't all the different spices look so cool against the white flour... I even included the ginger this time because I thought last week's pumpkin bread was a bit bland without it. 

Cream the wet ingredients...

Then mix in the pumpkin

The batter will become such a pretty orange

Then you just blend the dry with the wet.  It formed a very loose batter that poured into the pan easily...

Right into a 350 degree oven for 30 minutes. 

Doesn't it look lovely??  Jonathan and I took off to get some lunch and run some errands a soon as it came out.  I used the toothpick test but even though it came out clean I was concerned it was a little undercooked because I thought  I saw a jiggle when I pulled it out.

Sure enough I came home to find it had sunk!

The picture doesn't do that the crater that developed full justice. 

Once the cake was out of the oven I got the butter ready for the frosting.

I decided to go with the vanilla buttercream because I often find cream cheese frosting to be overwhelming.  I've never made a buttercream frosting... At least not one that called for 2-1/2 sticks of butter! 

At the end of the day I made up three cups of frosting.  Since I wasn't going to take the cake out of the pan I didn't need the full four cups.  Actually three cups seemed excessive.

Making the frosting was a messy business.... Trying to blend two tablespons of milk (I didn't have any cream), 2 tsp of vanilla, 1/8 tsp salt with 2-1/2 sticks of butter had the liquid splashing everywhere!  But I did finally get it blended together pretty well.

The next mess was measuring the powdered sugar and trying to get it blended in.  The recipe only called for 2-1/2 cups powdered sugar, which I think is too little.  If I made this frosting again I'd do at least 3 cups. 

Messy... But it did come together nice and fluffy.

To me it tasted like whipped butter - not frosting.  I used all of it to frost the cake but it's pretty thick in some parts.

I tried not to fill up the crater with icing so it wasn't incredibly thick there.  Time for a piece!

All in all not bad.  Like I said the frosting was more like whipped butter so it was a bit like eating pumpkin bread with a very thick spread of butter.  Jonathan thought the frosting just needed more sugar.  That would help I'm sure but I thought it needed something texture wise too.  Maybe nuts in the cake or chocolate chips in or on the cake...  I don't know maybe this is just too tame for my bored taste buds.  It might be right up your alley!  For the complete recipe check out Betsy's blog.