Lekker: Maple Bourbon Pumpkin Cake

My last blog post was about the amazingly simple Salted Butter Apple Galette, which I love as an alternative to pie because I hate pie. SUE ME. In that pies are traditional for Thanksgiving dessert and my hatred of them does not take holidays, I opted to make this Maple Bourbon Pumpkin Cake.

I chose this because

1. bourbon and
2. because I didn't want a painfully sweet saccharine dessert.

This cake strikes the perfect balance between sweet (the glaze and the maple candied pecans) and boozy-spiced-fall-ness, and was a hit at my table. Try with vanilla ice cream.

I like to envision this method of decorating as all the pecans coming to worship at the pecan Altar of Candied Wonder in the middle.

It doesn't really matter which bourbon you decide to use. Maker's Mark is my do-or-die favourite, but I am poor now and cannot afford that so I was good ol' Jack for me. Most of it bakes off though, so honestly it doesn't make any difference.

So, let's get baking!

MAPLE BOURBON PUMPKIN CAKE
serves 8

WHAT YOU NEED

For the cake:

• 2 3/4 cups all purpose flour
• 1 T baking powder
• 1 t pumpkin pie spice
• 3/4 t salt
• 1 1/2 cups firmly packed dark brown sugar
• 1/3 cup unsalted butter, room temperature
• 2 eggs
• 1 t vanilla extract
• 1 cup cooked pumpkin (Use the tinned stuff like I did, since I had leftovers from making one of my all-time favourites: Pumpkin Soup.)
• 3/4 cup whole milk
• 1/3 cup bourbon of your choice

For the glaze:

• 2 cups confectioner's sugar, sifted after measuring
• 2 T half-and-half
• 1 T melted unsalted butter
• 1 1/2 T bourbon
• 1 t vanilla extract

For the maple glazed pecans:
Shocking that you would need pecans and maple syrup, right?

• 1/2 cup pecan halves
• 2 T pure maple syrup
• 1/2 t cinnamon

WHAT YOU DO

1.  First things first, in a small bowl mix together the pecans, maple syrup, and cinnamon really well. These babies are gonna soak in that goodness while you're mixing up the cake. Give it a stir every once in awhile to make sure the syrup gets into allllll the nooks & crannies.

2. Preheat your oven to 350 degrees F and grease two 8-inch round cake pans. (I suppose this cake could also be done in a Bundt pan or some other loaf pan, or as cupcakes, but I don't know the cooking times and what have you for that.)

In a medium sized mixing bowl whisk together the flour, baking powder, pumpkin pie spice, and salt. Whisk it well, since I'm saving you the hassle of actually sifting that flour separately to aerate it!

3. In another larger mixing bowl, beat the butter with an electric mixer until light yellow and fluffy. Add the brown sugar, and beat again until light and fluffy. Add the eggs and mix well. See: light and fluffy. (Get the picture?) Then add your pumpkin and vanilla. It might look a little grainy and weird after you add the pumpkin, but don't try to overbeat it just to get rid of that. It's fine.

4. With your mixer on low, add half the flour mixture to the wet batter. Mix well. Add the milk, and mix well. Add the other half of the flour, and ___ ____. Finally, dump in the bourbon and mix well-ish.

5. Pour the batter evenly into your pans, and bake at 350 for about 20-ish minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean. Remove the pans and set on top of wire cooling racks for about 10 minutes (this gives the cake time to contract from the sides of the pan) and then flip out onto the racks to finish cooling.

6. *While* those babies are cooling, and your oven is still at 350, it's time to do the pecans! Line a baking sheet with parchment paper, and dump your maple coated pecans on there. Bake for 5 minutes, then remove and toss, and bake for 5 minutes more. That's all it should take for them to go all nicely dark brown and smell amazing. Feel free to taste test one.

7. Since that only took 10 minutes and your cakes are probably still cooling, you can mix up your glaze now and give it time to set up.

Tangent: I have a love-hate relationship with glazes. They are easy because they literally involve just dumping everything together and stirring until smooth (so...do that), BUT. Since glazes have a more liquid consistency than frosting, you kind of just dribble it down over the top of the cake and hope that it will come dripping down the sides attractively. But if you want those attractive little drips, then you can't pour too much glaze on...WHICH MEANS THERE ISN'T ENOUGH GLAZEY GOODNESS ON THE DAMN CAKE! And I won't stand for that.

So what you should do is schmear a decent amount on the inside of your two 8-inch layers as a filling, and *then* content yourself with dribbling the glaze over the top. If you want to put something else or nothing at all in the middle, then here's what I suggest: do one layer of slow glaze dribbling. Stop. Leave it alone for about 15 minutes, giving it time to set up. Then come back and do a second layer. It still won't give you a ton of glaze on the sides, but there's more on the top and whatever, I suppose that works.

8. I honestly don't even remember where we were now. Oh right, okay so you made the glaze. Once the cakes are cool, stack them on a cake plate and glaze accordingly as discussed/ranted about above. Decorate with the pecans as you wish. Done!

It would have been nice if I had remembered to take a photo of the *inside* once we had cut a slice, but no. Of course not. FOR THE RECORD, though, it's a lovely dusty dark orange.

Recipe originally inspired by this one by Bakerella.

Lekker: Salted Caramel Pretzel Brownies

I celebrated my 23rd birthday on Thursday September 5th (yay for Virgos!) so it's been a bit of a whirlwind this week. No time to cook! (But I do have some cold-brined pickles that are busy...pickling...in the fridge that I'll write about once I can taste them.)

I always make a dessert to bring to work for my birthday, because, well, it's an excuse for cake! EXCEPT. Last year I was equal parts laughably unprepared and ridiculously over-ambitious to attempt the four layer rainbow cake that I had in mind.

It was OK for a second:

But with no support between the layers, it took about 5 seconds for THIS to happen:

HAH! Fail. And so, the sad cake lived out the rest of its short life in multiple Pyrex containers.

It's not that I can't bake cakes; in fact I've had way more successful cakes than unsuccessful ones so I can't really tell you what I was thinking with this. Drunk, maybe. Good possibility, actually.

(Sidebar: My 19-year-old brother says that "baking cakes" is the term the young people are using to mean "talking" now. Like, you're not actually exclusively dating someone yet but you're not just friends, you're "baking cakes". Is that really a thing? What is it called when you actually start dating? "Roasting chickens"? I am only 23 and now I feel 80. Thank you, Ry.)

Anyway, so this year I decided to do something a little different and stumbled across the idea of Salted Caramel Pretzel Brownies on Pinterest. The concept sounded magical to me, combining salty and sweet with fudgy chocolatey goodness. Yes please! Only problem was, the instructions sucked and most commentators couldn't stop moaning about all the problems they were having. So I decided to wing it and figure it out myself, so here we go!

It doesn't really look like the pretzels are there, but they are, I promise!

Salted Caramel Pretzel Brownies
makes about 12 pieces, depending on how big you cut them; they're pretty rich, unlike me

What You Need
1 box "Family Size 13 x 9" fudgy brownie mix (I used Betty Crocker) plus the ingredients to make them according to box directions
1 bag pretzels (I used the square waffle-type ones because I figured they would be easier for cutting and I'm pretty sure I'm right)
2 5.5 ounce bags of Werther's Creamy Caramels 
1 tablespoon half-and-half
Sea salt

What You Do
1. Preheat the oven to the temperature indicated on the box of brownie mix. Prepare the brownies according to directions. Line a square 8 x 8 or 9 x 9 pan with parchment paper; or, alternatively, you could try simply greasing it well. I opted for parchment paper so I could lift the brownies out of the pan for easier cutting, but it's up to you, I don't think it's a train smash either way.

2. Pour about half of the brownie mix into the bottom of the pan. Then gently place a layer of pretzels on top of that batter. Now do another layer. (The pretzels will get sort of soft during the baking process so it's not like you're chomping straight into a hard, totally crunchy pretzel in the middle of a soft brownie.) Gently pour the rest of the brownie batter on top of the pretzels, smooth it out nicely and toss it in the oven. Follow the baking times listed on the box for your pan size.

3. While those are baking you can start making your caramel sauce. Unwrap all of those individual caramels and throw them in a small pot with the half and half. Over the LOWEST temperature possible, allow them to melt slowly, stirring with a wooden spoon.

 This is about halfway through the melting process. Keep stirring as much as possible to keep the heat even and prevent burning.

You can adjust the amount of half-and-half if it's too thick; you want the consistency to be pourable from the pot but not too runny.

Like this.

4. When the brownies are done, allow them to cool for about 20 minutes before you pour the caramel over top. Wait about a minute or two for the caramel to set (you can wash the caramel pot at this point; TRUST ME you do not want to let it set in the pot or you will absolutely hate your life and everyone in it who allowed you to get to that point of prying enamel/caramel off a pot with a butter knife and possibly stabbing yourself in the process--NOT that I'm speaking from experience...) and then sprinkle the sea salt over top, pressing it down a bit into the caramel. Isn't it so pretty, sparkling on there?! I loved it.

Well you can't really see the sparkling, but it's there!

5. All done! Once it's completely cool you can slice and dice to your heart's content. Run your knife under hot water before you make the slices; it'll help to get through the caramel a bit easier. I could totally see these being served with some vanilla ice cream. They were a hit at the office and successfully glued SOME PEOPLE'S jaws shut, which was a nice change. (Kidding, kidding.)

22 was without a doubt the best year of my life thus far, and my life is generally pretty awesome so that was actually a hard call to make. But it's true, and I can't wait to see what 23 will bring.

Cheers, darlings!

Lagniappe: FAIL.

Consistency is not my strong suit. My best friend Ghost once told me I was predictable in my unpredictability, so it's safe to say I won't be sticking to some sort of blogging "schedule"--my life is structured enough, thanks!

It's not that I'm not cooking though. I always am, usually about 5 days a week, tooling around with new recipes or finessing old ones with the eventual goal of posting them here. But, like any human I am prone to failure and not all of these recipes are successes! Whether it's due to human error on my part or a poorly written original recipe, the gaps in posting can be chalked up to something that didn't work out.

My godfather Harry suggested that I *do* write about my failures to have a more balanced viewpoint, but without any positive conclusion (this recipe was totally screwy, but LOOK, here's how I fixed it!) it's just a long FAIL blog post and no one wants that. For example, do you want to read an entire post about how the Lemon Blueberry Loaf I attempted on Monday was too moist, too dense, and wayyyyy too much work with glazing this and sifting that and zesting this and the other thing? At the end of the day it's just me being mad at a cake on my counter and what is THAT? No.

If I think a recipe is worth another shot (that cake is not, btw) I will continue to work with it and tweak it (like the Crispy Zucchini Cakes I attempted and screwed up--too much onion, too much moisture, cakes too big and tall) until I have a success, where I will write about it and mention how I royally effed it all up before so that you don't have to waste your time making my same mistakes. See: History; repeating itself, et. al.

tl; dr I don't blog about my failed cooking escapades because that's stupid and not the point of this blog.

I'm in Long Island with my Bonus Parents (godparents that are way more than godparents) this Labor Day weekend so I won't be doing much experimenting. In the meantime, drink one for me to toast the end of summer (BUT WHO IS REALLY WANTING TO TOAST THAT??? COME HERE SO I CAN SMACK YOU!) and I'll be back in the kitchen with flour on my nose and sugar sparkling on my skin next week.

The shitty, ill-fated Lemon Blueberry Loaf.