Pumpkin Patch Cake

I’m a dreamer and not a doer; I accepted this sad reality decades ago. I can see beautiful works of art in my head, but my fingers can’t seem to translate that beauty into paint/clay/glass/cake.

Take my last cake decorating attempt for example. This Cake Wreck was for my nephew’s 16th birthday which we celebrated early during the day on Halloween.



I envisioned a Halloween pumpkin patch filled with fondant pumpkins, scarecrows, spooky trees, black cats, and trick-or-treating kids dressed as ghosts. But, sadly, I was doomed before I even started. The cake baked up fine, but then I tried a new recipe for Chocolate Fudge Frosting.

Bad decision.

The recipe was a simple mixture of sugar, milk, butter, chocolate chips. Ha! I don’t know what I did wrong, but my frosting seized and rapidly turned into a brick.



What happened!@#@? I bought my sugar, milk and butter to a boil and then removed it from the heat. I added the chocolate chips and stirred. Immediately the liquid butter separated from the chocolate and floated on top. I stirred and stirred, but the butter would not reincorporate. I finally poured off the butter, tossed in a few nuts and flopped the hardening frosting into a pan. A few minutes later it was as solid as a rock.

Paniced, I whipped up a batch of buttercream to frost the cake and then used my go-to ganache recipe for a chocolate coating to pour over the top. By now I was frustrated, disappointed, and I didn’t feel like starting on the fondant figures. So I slapped on a few mellow cream pumpkins I bought a Cracker Barrel, squirted on some buttercream vines and leaves, and called it finished.



But as always my family gushed over the cake and said it was very cute. I gotta love my family. They don’t care how it looks, as long as it tastes good.