What holiday cake stands 11 inches tall and weighs 23.5 pounds? What cake has an estimated total calorie count of 20,000 calories or 2,000 calories per slice and is not a wedding cake for 300 people? The Pumpecapple piecake of course!
Dapper Greg Morago, Food Editor of The Houston Chronicle, called us a few weeks ago and asked if we would fulfill his whim of competing with the Cherpumple piecake (cherry, pumpkin and apple pies baked in cakes). Greg read about the Cherpumple piecake in the Wall Street Journal and felt cherry pie was not a Thanksgiving standard, but pumpkin, pecan and apple were the family favorites. Because we had been honored by Country Living magazine as the best mail-order pecan pie “…America has to offer…”(yes I am putting in a plug) he thought he might get lucky and we would fulfill his dream of creating a special cake – the turducken of holiday desserts, named by Greg Morago, which is sure to be a trend.
SO YOU ASK WHAT IS THIS CONFECTION?
The Pumpecapple piecake consists of the following scratch pies, cake and icing from bottom to top (feel free to change the order):
Pumpkin Pie baked in a pumpkin spice cake
Filled with cream cheese icing
Pecan Pie (or chocolate pecan pie) baked in chocolate cake
Filled with cream cheese icing
Apple pie baked in our spice cake
Iced all over with our cream cheese icing
Garnished with pecan pieces And topped with a generous drizzle of caramel. I ate about four bites and declared it enough.
Greg tasted each layer and Mayra Beltran, The Houston Chronicle photographer, ate more bites than I could count.
Greg asked if we would sell it, and I thought “Why not?”– pickup or delivery only, for we have not a clue as to how to ship it. He asked the cost for one Pumpecapple piecake and we can’t remember what we told him, but now we decided it should be $10/lb. or $235.00 and five days notice, for we have to make 3 pies and 3 cakes. It is on sale for $175 for this holiday season.
My husband, Robert Jucker – the baker, said the oven time was five hours just to bake the pies in the cakes. It was his idea on how to make it and thanks to Heather, one of our decorating team, for making it look beautiful enough to eat.
HOW TO MAKE THE PUMPECAPPLE PIECAKE AT HOME
If you would like to make the Pumpecapple piecake for fun and not from scratch, you can do the following:
Buy the pies, Buy a bunch of boxed cake mix – emphasis on BUNCH
Make the cake mix for each piecake
Put the pie upside down in the round cake pan (same size as pie, ie., 10” pan for 10” pie)
Pour the cake mix in the pan so it more than covers the pie
Bake it until you think it is done.
When we were taking the cakes out of the pan, the pumpkin piecake was not done, so we actually put it back in the oven. We did not finish icing the Pumpecapple piecake until 20 minutes before Greg and Myra arrived. I think it ended up a good thing, for it was gooey when we cut into it and tasted divine! The picture of the Cherpumple looked frozen, but showed the strata (like in a mountain) better than ours.
Anyway, to read more about the Pumpecapple piecake, see Greg Morago’s article in The Houston Chronicle Star section on Wednesday 11/24/10 or online .
Thank you Greg for a fun time with you and Mayra and whenever you want to invent some baked item, we hope you call us again.
Read our Blog about the filming of the Food Network’s Outrageous Food and the making of the Pumpecapple. The link to the Food Network TV video is at the bottom this other post.
