- Today I'm gonna show you
one of my signature holiday treats,
these little mini pumpkin cakes.
They're not real pumpkins,
they're cake that looks like a pumpkin
and they are delicious, okay?
(laughing)
They're butter cream, spicy cake inside,
cream cheese frosting in the middle
and no fondant people, just pure deliciousness.
So much easier than you think.
Let's get started.
To make the batter,
we're gonna use three cups or 360 grams of all purpose flour
and I will be weighing this out
because I don't wanna measure it exactly in a measuring cup.
So much work.
All right, in you go, 235,
278, okay, 360 grams exactly.
Away you go.
Now we're gonna add in the rest
of our dry ingredients.
So that's a teaspoon of baking soda
and a teaspoon of baking powder,
two teaspoons of ground cinnamon,
ground ginger, all spice,
a pinch of cloves which is optional.
Some people hate cloves,
I don't mind them at all.
And a nice pinch of nutmeg,
healthy pinch there.
Don't forget half a teaspoon of salt.
Let's sieve that all together.
Give it a quick whisk.
And now we're gonna set it aside
and mix up the wet mixture.
For the wet mixture,
we're adding in one quarter cup of vegetable oil,
half a cup of melted coconut oil.
If you don't have coconut or if you're not a fan,
just use three quarters of a cup of veggie oil
and it'll be totally cool.
Now we're adding in a quarter cup of brown sugar,
two hunkin cups of regular, old, granulated sugar
and don't forget one third of a cup of plain yogurt.
This adds in some extra moisture.
Okay, now let's mix it up and then add our eggs in.
Alright, that creamed up nicely,
now we're adding in three eggs, one at a time.
Let them incorporate before you add the next in
and mix on like lowish.
One, two and three.
Just make sure you scrape the bottom of the bowl down.
Mix for a few more seconds
to make sure everything's incorporated.
And then we'll move on to the next step.
Now we're gonna be adding in our dry mixture
and alternating that with the pumpkin.
Don't think I forgot the pumpkin.
Add the dry mixture and the pumpkin puree
in about three alternating batches.
Little pumpkin, a little bit more dry mixture.
A little bit more pumpkin
and we can toss the rest of the dry mixture in now.
Okay, everything's in, scrape the bowl down,
mix a little bit more and we're done.
Okay, done, now we're gonna transfer this to a piping bag.
And then pipe our mixture into our mini bundt pans.
You can butter and flour your pans,
but lot of little details in there.
I'm just gonna use baking spray
which is like a sprayable oil
that has flour already mixed in.
It also smells like supermarket sheet cake,
which I find strangely intoxicating.
Okay, anyways, spray away.
(tuneful music)
All right, that's all done.
Now let's get that mixture in there.
Right, snip the tip off with some scissors.
Right, and now we're gonna pipe this in.
Don't overfill these.
Halfway is totally fine
because our pumpkins are gonna be regular pumpkins,
not really tall, crazy looking pumpkins.
resist the temptation to overfill, I know it's very strong.
This will make enough for 18 little mini buns.
So this is batch number one.
Pop it down like this or onto your counter
if you're not afraid of denting it.
(giggling)
Get that batter all in there.
And now we're gonna pop this into the oven
at 354, like 17 minutes, maybe 20, we'll see.
The center should be set, these bake up really quick though.
These big for about 20 minutes at 350
and you don't have to let them cool in the pans.
Just pop them right out.
Take a look at this.
There we go.
All right, now we can let them cool down to room temperature
and then frost them.
Let's make that butter cream while they cool.
For the butter cream.
I've added in four sticks
or one pound of unsalted butter at room temperature,
giving it a little cream in the mixer,
fitted with the paddle attachment.
And now I will be pouring in two pounds
of confectioner sugar in a couple of batches.
Don't add them all at once.
If you do, there'll be a giant poof
and a mess all over the place.
Let's sdd that sugar in.
Close and I'm gonna cover this with a tea towel
because I do not want that toxic sugar cloud.
Okay, it's a lot of sugar.
So let's pour in some of that milk right now.
Good, now we can add in some more sugar.
(tuneful music)
We're getting close.
I'm gonna add the rest of the sugar in.
I do want the butter cream to be a little bit more stiff.
It's not a sheet cake.
It's like a little pumpkin that you have to carve.
So you want the butter cream
to have a nice and firm consistency.
(tuneful music)
I'm also gonna add in my little splash of vanilla.
A good very healthy pinch of salt
'cause that's a lot of sugar.
(tuneful music)
My butter cream looks perfect,
except I'm making orange pumpkins,
not the white ones.
So orange food coloring and a little bit of brown.
The orange is very bright.
We're gonna tone it down
and make it more natural with a brown.
I'm just gonna add in a drop or two of orange
and an actual drop or two a brown, one, two.
Right now,let's mix on low.
(tuneful music)
All right, this is the color I have right now.
It doesn't look that orange.
However, once the buttercream dries out after it's set,
it'll become more vivid.
This is an extra step.
You could totally use the regular butter cream
but I love cream cheese frosting and something about it
with these pumpkin cakes is addictive.
So we're making a little batch of cream cheese frosting
to sandwich in between our pumpkin cakes.
One eight ounce package of room temperature cream cheese
into your mixing bowl.
Then two cups of confectioner sugar,
but let's give this a mix first.
(tuneful music)
All right, now one cup in.
(tuneful music)
Mix it up.
Add in a teaspoon of vanilla, this looks amazing.
Cream cheese frosting is the best,
I love it.
All right, a little bit more sugar.
Two cups in total.
(tuneful music)
Look at this, this is so creamy, it's unreal.
I don't know if you can see
but it's just like this silky,
cream cheese, delicious amazingness.
Transfer this to a piping bag
because we're gonna start assembling our pumpkins.
Okay, so I'm like fantasizing about all the ways
I could eat this right now.
I'm gonna snip the tip off of this.
There you go.
Squeeze it up,
and we're ready to pipe.
My little pumpkin buns are nice and room temperature.
You don't want to try to do this when they are warm people.
All the but tercream will melt off
and you're gonna be so sad.
It's happened to me when I've been making a cake.
And my husband says like,
"What's going on?
What's going on with your cake?"
I'm like, "It's fine, walk away."
Let's get started.
We're gonna start off by trimming these
because it's a little tall
and I don't want all that space.
So give them a nice flat top and lower it down.
This is called a snacking top.
It's delicious.
Do the same to the other one.
Okay, now when you place them together,
that looks like a nice pumpkin to me.
Like a nice, little, baby mini pumpkin.
Next step is to pipe that cream cheese frosting in there.
Just give it a nice swirl, perfect.
Top it off.
Take a little bit of your snacking top,
not too much, because this is for you to eat.
And we're going to fill the center
and so a little bit of extra frosting,
just popping that top there
and push it down, there we go.
Now, let's start enrobing it in some orange buttercream.
Let's get some parchment paper.
Cut a square.
Now, parchment square goes on and stays on.
Pipe the bottom, so here.
Just get it started.
Don't worry about it looking perfect or anything right now.
Now start piping it off.
Swirl, nice and thick.
You'll be removing a lot of this.
So don't feel like, ah, this is gross,
so much butter cream.
Most of it's gonna come off in the shaping process.
There we go.
A beautiful pumpkin, all done.
(laughing)
Just kidding.
Now we have to shape it
but what you can do for a shaping tool?
Some magical special thing you got at a store
for special baker's special?
No, you're gonna use gonna use a yogurt container,
any kind of plastic container will do actually.
So we'll start off.
Just cut that rib off.
This is the part we need, that flexible edge.
So let's cut a little bit off.
And now, what shape will you cut?
Well, let me tell you,
it's gonna be like a V.
So, one, I'll pick that up later.
And two, like that.
This is gonna help us shape the ribs of that pumpkin.
So, let me show you how that will work.
Gonna go in, pull up like that,
then turn, continue the process.
Now we're just roughing out a pumpkin.
It is not gonna look cute.
It's not gonna look great.
It's a rough pumpkin.
Clean your tool off in between swipes
and then just keep rotating and completing.
And already, this is looking pretty nice.
Like, I can imagine this being a pumpkin.
We're getting close.
Let's cut another tool from that yogurt container.
And this time it's gonna be almost like it is right now,
just kind of a scalloped shape.
So just round it off a bit
and we're gonna use that to clean up the centers.
Look how much better that's looking already.
This is looking nice,
like I'm pretty happy with where my pumpkin's at.
You can keep cleaning it off,
lift the bottom up,
so it doesn't look like a saggy pumpkin.
We want a young, baby pumpkin.
Now, we're done.
This is a done pumpkin.
Am I done, done?
No, we're done into the fridge to chill.
When you put this in the fridge,
it's gonna darken up and it'll become nice and firm.
Once it's firm,
you can begin really sculpting it
and smoothing it down till it looks like a real pumpkin.
So exciting, it's gonna be magic.
Okay, into the fridge
and I'm gonna come back out with the chilled one.
Okay, I just finished washing my hands
because I will be putting my hands on these pumpkins
and some people are really grossed out
when they see someone touching their food.
Here's my chilled pumpkin.
Look how chilled it is.
I can actually handle it
and it's not falling off, yet.
(tuneful music)
Back on the turntable,
and what we're gonna do,
is shape it a little bit.
You can use your smoothing tools
and now it's like sculpting really nicely.
(tuneful music)
But if you just use some clean, wet fingers,
so wet your fingers in some water,
and then look at that.
You can just shape it so quickly.
(tuneful music)
That's the magic right there.
So I'll just do one side really quickly
so you can see.
Right, doesn't that look nice already?
It looks so much more like a pumpkin.
That a pumpkin?
A pumpkin.
(giggling)
Alright, just keep wetting your fingers off
because they will be covered in butter and sugar
and then continue smoothing.
This would be such a fun project
for little kids to help out with.
You make the little pumpkin cakes,
you start shaping them,
so you rough them up and chill them
and now little kids dip their fingers in
and then just shape the pumpkin,
it's like basically playing with clay.
We are all done except for the stem.
What about the stem?
There's so many different things you can do.
I'm gonna give you the easiest option
because I mean this is kind of a lot of work already.
I don't wanna do more, I have things to do.
I need to live my life.
(giggling)
So here's your easiest thing, use a real stem.
Just clip it off and snip it on.
Let me show you.
These are called Cinderella pumpkins,
but basically they're baby pumpkins with long stems.
And if you buy one,
you can just use your shears
and snip off the tip.
Careful of your fingers,
I take no responsibility.
(giggling)
And then pop it on like that.
What, is that a real pumpkin?
(giggling) Oh my gosh.
It looks so real with this real stem on it.
You just pop it off and you wanna eat.
Live your life.
Okay, so this means to chill once again.
That way you can handle it,
put it on your plate, serve it.
I think this is like the cutest little decoration
that you could have as a centerpiece.
You could have it as like a surprising dessert.
Let me know what you think in the comments.
Do you like these?
Would you make an orange one?
A green one, gray, blue, white?
I kinda like the idea of a white pumpkin,
but I don't know if someone would identify that
and think, oh, a pumpkin.
But I like using less food coloring,
so that's my reasoning.
Okay, into the fridge you go,
you cute, little baby pumpkin.
(giggling)
Are you ready for the big reveal?
Take a look at this.
This is a palette knife for painting by the way,
but it's a little mini cake dispenser.
Ah, do you see this?
This is so delicious.
Moist pumpkin cake, that cream cheese frosting
and it's vanilla buttercream on the outside.
The fondant just wouldn't taste good.
I'm gonna eat this and love it, okay.
(tuneful music)
Oh my God.
(tuneful music)
That is so good.
The spiciness, the moist pumpkin cake.
That cream cheese frosting has the perfect tang.
It is addictive and the vanilla buttercream is nice
and mellow and not too sweet.
(laughing)
I really hope you get to make this blop.
Thanks for watching.
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