Pumpkin Spice Bundt Cake With Buttermilk Icing

Yes, I know. I’m supposed to be on a baking ban. One I put on myself. To keep from baking until the holidays when there would be a deluge of sweets. One important thing to note: I don’t have a lot of willpower. Also, I like pumpkin and it’s everywhere! What good would fall be if I didn’t bake pumpkin treats? And we were having friends over for dinner. It would have been incredibly rude of me to not have a dessert to offer them after dinner. Incredibly rude. They might not come back and then we’d be friendless. Can’t have that now, can we? So I caved. I baked a bundt.

One of my favorite food blogs, The Food Librarian (And seriously, I love that name! Talk about combining two of my favorite things!), is posting a month of bundt recipes and I couldn’t handle it! Had. To. Bake. There are so many fantastic recipes I want to try, but I zeroed in on this one immediately. YUM. Try it and you’ll see why.

Note: My icing didn’t thicken up properly so I’ll probably play with it a bit next time. Still delicious though!

Pumpkin Spice Bundt Cake With Buttermilk Icing

Adapted from Gourmet (and as seen on The Food Librarian)

For cake:
1 1/2 sticks unsalted butter, softened, plus additional for greasing pan
2 1/4 cups flour, plus additional for dusting pan
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
2 teaspoons cinnamon
1 teaspoon allspice
1/2 teaspoon nutmeg
1/2 teaspoon cloves
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 1/4 cups canned solid-pack pumpkin
3/4 cup well-shaken buttermilk
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 1/4 cups sugar
3 eggs

For Icing:
2 tablespoons plus 2 t. well-shaken buttermilk
1 1/2 cups confectioners’ sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 dash cinnamon

Make cake:
Put oven rack in middle position and preheat oven to 350°F. Butter bundt pan generously, then dust with flour, knocking out excess.

Whisk together flour (2 1/4 cups), baking powder, baking soda, cinnamon, allspice, and salt in a bowl. Whisk together pumpkin, 3/4 cup buttermilk, and vanilla in another bowl.

Beat butter (1 1/2 sticks) and granulated sugar in a large bowl with an electric mixer at medium-high speed until pale and fluffy, 3 to 5 minutes, then add eggs and beat 1 minute. Reduce speed to low and add flour and pumpkin mixtures alternately in batches, beginning and ending with flour mixture and mixing until batter is just smooth.

Spoon batter into pan, smoothing top, then bake until a wooden pick or skewer inserted in center of cake comes out clean, 45 to 50 minutes. Cool cake in pan on a rack 15 minutes, then invert rack over cake and reinvert cake onto rack. Cool 10 minutes more.

Make icing:
While cake is cooling, whisk together buttermilk, vanilla, cinnamon and confectioners sugar until smooth. Drizzle icing over warm cake, then cool cake completely. Icing will harden slightly.

~ by spontaneoustruth on October 25, 2009.