18-Layer Pumpkin Cake with Caramel Buttercream (with Recipe)

This is a cake I made to entertain a couple friends this weekend in a dinner get together-turned-seven hour long wine and friendship marathon complete with a showing of the last twenty minutes of The Emperor's New Groove both subbed and dubbed in Mandarin Chinese, a Patsy Cline singalong, and a lengthy brainstorming session in an effort to determine what livelihoods fifteen or so of our mutual acquaintances would have in a medieval English village.

18 layers! Count 'em

I chose a pumpkin cake to complement the leftover caramel buttercream from the previous post (recipe here), and it came out so moist it didn't even need a soaking syrup. Because of its incredible spongy consistency, I decided to try slicing the cake into as many super-thin layers as possible.

The assembled cake before being rough-iced

That elasticity produced by the egg and oil emulsion used in this cake (I thought about classifying it as a chiffon cake, but it wasn't leavened with stiffly beaten egg whites... regardless, the consistency is pretty chiffony) kept the layers flexible enough that even fairly thin ones wouldn't crumble to pieces while being handled.

Vanity shot

The cake recipe is basically a pumpkin bread that I've been playing around with for several years. While I usually replace as much as half of the flour in the following recipe with cocoa powder, giving the cake a much more dense consistency and delicious chocolatey flavor, I decided to keep the cocoa out this time so that the flavors of pumpkin and caramel could be the center of attention.

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Pumpkin Cake (AKA Re-purposed Pumpkin Bread)

4 cups all purpose flour
3/4 cup powdered milk
2 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
1 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1 teaspoon nutmeg
2 cups sugar
4 eggs
1 cup canola oil
1 teaspoon apple cider vinegar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 29 oz can pumpkin or two 15 oz cans (the extra oz won't much matter)

Preheat the oven to 350°. To achieve the results I did, grease two six inch by three inch cake pans, line the bottoms with parchment paper, grease again and flour. Whisk together dry ingredients including the sugar in a large bowl and set aside. In another bowl whisk the eggs and oil together until an emulsion forms, and then add the vinegar, vanilla and finally the pumpkin. Fold the dry into the wet, handling the batter as little as possible. Split the batter between the two pans, and bake until done, maybe around 45 minutes (I don't much trust set baking times and tend to just keep an eye on the cake and test with a skewer when the cake springs back then poked). Let cool and refrigerate for at least a few hours before carving the layers.

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A note on cake slicing technique:

I slice my layers by first using a serrated knife to mark the line I'll be following by cutting very shallowly into the side of the cake as I steady it with my left hand, apply a little pressure, and twist it on the turntable. Once the entire circumference of the layer has been marked with a groove, I go around again cutting deeper, making sure to keep the entire length of the knife perfectly horizontal and completely in the groove, until I've sliced all the way through. I slip a cutting mat underneath the layer and remove it onto a plate, and continue to apply the same technique to the remaining cake. In order to keep the layers properly oriented I sometimes cut a notch in the side of the cake running from top to bottom before I begin to carve slices, using that to line the layers up when reassembling with frosting.


The slices held together perfectly when cut and transferred to the plate, thanks to that firm

and flexible consistency of the cake as well as the thinness of the layers of buttercream.

Yep. A very autumnal cake in the dead of winter. Try it out! You can also bake the pumpkin cake into muffins or a loaf, and then you can get away with eating it for breakfast.

Or you could throw caution to the wind and have 18-layer pumpkin cake with caramel buttercream at 8 am. Screw cheerios!

xo
Azara