Pumpkin Cake with Browned Butter Cream Cheese Frosting to Celebrate My Blogging Anniversary

The first thing you probably noticed about this post is the ugly cake.  This Pumpkin Cake with Browned Butter Cream Cheese Frosting is a lot of things, but pretty is not one of them.  It does taste great though, and I learned a number of things from it, so I am going to share them after I talk about my blog anniversary a bit.

One year ago today, I started From Calculus to Cupcakes.  Honestly, I didn’t think anyone would ever read it.  Very few did, and I only posted sporadically.  I mean, it wasn’t like anyone was reading it consistently anyway.  Then, one day last spring, I pinned something I had posted, and all of a sudden there were readers out there.  So, I started posting more consistently, pinned some more things, put some pictures on photo sites, and now I have quite a few readers.  I have learned so much in the last year.  Yes, some about cooking, but more about writing, photography, and the computer – even a tiny bit of coding.  So, if you are one of my regular readers, thank you!  And, if you are just stopping by, I hope you will become a regular.

Now, back to the cake.  You see, I had this idea.  I was going to make a pumpkin cake and then cover it in a mixture of black and orange sprinkles because it is almost Halloween.  So, I went about trying to do this.  Only I never could get it to look right.  The sprinkles were not sticking well enough.  Well, after playing with it a bit, I am pretty sure that was because my icing was too stiff.  I made it extra stiff because the cake came out kind of rounded on top, and I wanted to kind of spackle it with the icing so that it stood up straight.  (Don’t worry, the recipe is not that stiff.)  So, I went and looked online at sprinkle cakes, and one thing I noticed is that you can see the white icing a bit, but it just didn’t look right with the black and orange.  If I were to try this again, I think chocolate icing would work much better with black and orange.  So, having decided that the sprinkle cake idea was a failure, I tried to get the sprinkles off.  They may not have stuck well, but trying to get them off was even worse.  And, to top it all off, I had other things to do today.  This was taking way too long, and I was running out of icing.  So, I covered up the sprinkles as much as possible, but it looked really bad, much worse than it does now, so I added sprinkles back, and sanding sugar, and candy bats, and confetti, and a little of all of the edible Halloween decorations I had on hand.  I know it is hard to believe, but it really does look better.  I should have taken pictures of the kitchen.  There were sprinkles pretty much everywhere.  The clean up was a nightmare!

The delicious cake underneath though is a different story altogether.  It is wonderful – super moist with just the right spice!  I might suggest sprinkling the top with a few toasted pecans instead of crazy mixed up sprinkles.  I adapted this recipe from Cooking Light via My Recipes.  But, don’t let that fool you, my adaptations included fattening it up a bit.  I made a different cream cheese icing – one with browned butter, which was yummy.  Of course, I love browned butter, but if you don’t feel free to use regular.  Hope you enjoy!