Tomorrow morning I will be making my cooking début on live television, whooohoooooo! The lovely people from SABC3 Expresso Breakfast Show and Sasko have invited me to be a regular guest throughout 2012, and I cannot wait to embark on this fantastic new adventure.
I will be cooking a chocolate pumpkin cake from Sasko’s inventive recipe book – an amazingly user-friendly book complete with step-by-step photographs. That makes following the recipe really easy!
Most people haven’t heard of a pumpkin cake before. Don’t worry, me neither! However, I am a huge fan of pumpkin pie and of course the ultimate little pumpkin fritter covered in cinnamon sugar. See the pumpkin cake as the decadent twin of the pumpkin pie: a dense, moist, buttery cake resembling a baked custard crossed with a malva pudding. And to top it all off, it is covered with a rich and smooth chocolate icing. A daringly delicious end result, if I may say so myself.
Ingredients for the cake:
- 250 g soft butter/margarine
- 250 ml castor sugar (200 g)
- 2 large eggs
- 30 ml apricot jam
- 500 ml cooked pumpkin, mashed (500 g)
- 5 ml vanilla essence
- 125 ml milk
- 500 ml Sasko Self-Raising Flour (250 g)
- 5 ml bicarbonate of soda
- 60 ml custard powder
Ingredients for the icing:
- 80 g soft butter/margarine
- 60 ml hot water
- 500 ml icing sugar (250 g)
- 60 ml cocoa powder
Method:
- Preheat oven to 180 degrees Celsius. Lightly grease and line a 23 cm round cake tin. Cream the butter and sugar with an electric beater.
- Beat in the eggs, jam, mashed pumpkin, vanilla, and milk.
- Sift the dry ingredients together and fold into the pumpkin mixture.
- Spoon mixture into the prepared tin and bake at 180 degrees Celsius for 55-60 minutes or until a skewer comes out clean.
- Cool the cake in the tin for 10 minutes and turn out onto a wire rack to cool completely.
- For the icing, sift icing sugar and cocoa together, then mix well with butter and water in a large bowl, using a wooden spoon, untill smooth and glossy.
- Spread icing evenly over cake and decorate.
For a truly decadent way of serving this cake, try sprinkling it with chopped nuts (like peanuts or walnuts), and serve with a dollop of freshly whipped cream – the German way!
Tip: To make icing with the consistency of a chocolate ganache, like I did in the photograph, I used recently boiled water instead of warm water. Pour/drizzle over cake and decorate.
i must have been living under a rock, but i just found your blog today, and i can’t stop paging through. Amazing amazing! Thanks for motivating me to get back to blogging myself.. this was the kick i needed 🙂
Also? Great to see you on Expresso in the mornings, love seeing fellow food bloggers succeed, makes me all glowy inside.
It’s so great to be called the motivator! What a great compliment.
And thank you so much for sharing my excitement about my tv gig – it’s something that I have wanted to do for years, and finally the ball is rolling!
I cannot wait for FBI 2012 in June, then we can all meet face to face at long last. A place where food obsessers can unite! 🙂