Pumpkin Cake with Cream Cheese Mousse
A one-bowl, lightly spiced pumpkin-teff layer cake with 3-ingredient whipped cream cheese mousse
While thinking about this week’s post and testing the recipe, I kept thinking, too soon for pumpkin? We’re still in late summer berries and plums, but I guess I was swayed by every restaurant menu, coffee shop, and Instagram post I saw touting their fall flavors and I fell for it because I love pumpkin.
I love pumpkin and all of the squashes, and every dessert you can think of from pie to ice cream, Thai curry with kabocha, to Silver Palate’s Smoky Pumpkin Soup that my mom has made practically every year since it came out in 1982.
Sure, we have plenty of time to get into more pumpkin and squash recipes once we really are into late October, but here’s a lovely little cake that goes together so quickly—a one bowl batter—and is just so pretty. I was originally going to make a Swiss roll, but I love how charming and simple this cake looks with its equal proportions of orange cake and white mousse stripes.
This is a soft, plush cake, with no added butter or oil—all of the moisture comes from the generous amount of canned pumpkin, and because there’s so much pumpkin in it, there’s not a hint of grittiness from the gluten free flour. I added some teff flour, but if you don’t have any, you can use GF flour to substitute, or oat flour. This recipe is made in a jelly roll pan, being that I started out making a Swiss roll; the pan seems to be ubiquitous everywhere except for my own kitchen, so I finally purchased two for testing. It’ll come in handy for bûche de noël and for when I finally do make a Swill roll.
The filling is a great addition to your cake-making recipe box of ideas: it’s simply lightly sweetened cream beaten with cream cheese. It’s practically impossible to over-whip, and when chilled it has a perfect set that is sliceable yet light and airy. I’d use this with your favorite carrot cake or red velvet cake as a lighter, less-sweet alternative to traditional cream cheese frosting.
I mostly blame my early entrée into pumpkin recipes on an Instagram account called “The Pancake Princess” who posted pumpkin tea cakes last week. If you aren’t familiar, Erika chooses something to bake and finds up to a dozen versions of popular recipes and compares and rates them with an army of tasters. I find her ratings really thoughtful and well-executed, and last week my pumpkin tea cake recipe came out on top from a list of twelve. Here’s the original Tartine Pumpkin Tea Cake recipe (it’s not gluten free, and I haven’t made it yet with GF flour). You can find her on Instagram @thepancakeprincess.
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