A cake for Thanksgiving (early)

We had a little Thanksgving gathering at work and I volunteered to bring a dessert. Since the usual suspects were covered, I ended up signing up to bring a cake, which is not really something that screams Thanksgiving!

I gave the cake a lot of thought (OK, I procrastinated until the last possible minute) and finally went with a yellow cake with fruit filling and buttercream icing. I must say that the taste was pretty good.

I doctored up a plain yellow cake mix (from Aldi) with this recipe, which was given to me by Cake Diva, over at twopeasinabucket. You just add the stuff to the cake mix and bake as directed on the package. I used half a recipe and it made two good 8" round layers:

2 pkg boxes white cake mix
2 cup flour
2 cup sugar
1 1/2 tsp salt
2 2/3 cup water
4 Tbs vegetable oil
2 tsp real vanilla
2 tsp pure almond extract (I omitted this)
2 cup (16 oz carton) sour cream
8 large egg whites (or 4 whole eggs)

I made the buttercream icing with this recipe, which I don't know where it came from, but it is the best buttercream ever!

• 1 cup unsalted butter (2 sticks or 1/2 pound), softened (but not melted!)
• 3-4 cups confectioners (powdered) sugar
• 1/4 teaspoon table salt
• 1 tablespoon vanilla extract
• up to 4 tablespoons milk or heavy cream

I mix it all by hand. It takes about 5 minutes, and the consistency is very creamy and delicious.

Once the layers were cool and the frosting was made I put the first layer onto a plate and spread a thick layer of fig jam. On the other layer of the cake I spread a thick layer of buttercream frosting and I stacked them, with the frosting directly on top of the jam. I then frosted the cake and piped the little green border.

At that point the cake was looking cute yet very boring. I got out the Wilton gumpaste and my Wilton flower cutters and made some sad-looking autumm leaves. You have no idea how sad the leaves were! So sad that I ran to ACMoore and got some pearl dust to cheer them up. This did the trick. Once the leaves were dry, I put the leaves on the cake and things started to look better, but we were still missing a focal point. I then decided to go out on a limb and make some pumpkins out of gumpaste. To make the pumpkins, I colored a lump of gumpaste orange, divided it into a big ball and two smaller balls, and rolled the balls until they were smooth. I then pressed with my thumb on the top of each ball, which gave them a nice pumpkiny shape, and made the indentations along the sides with the side of a fork. Stems were made with just a little green gumpaste stuck to the top of each pumpkin. Pearl dust made them glistened and covered all the imperfections! (I love that stuff!).

Since all this running and feverish decorating took place at the last minute, the pumpkins were still wet when I placed them on the cake. It would have been much better to let them dry, but I simply had no time for it.

The cake was a big success, tasty and so pretty!