Delicious Pumpkin

I love baked goods make with pumpkin! I love pumpkin pie, pumpkin roll, pumpkin bread, pumpkin coconut bread, pumpkin coconut cake, pumpkin upsidedown cake and I'm sure the list will go on as I find more delicious pumpkin recipes. Just last week I came across a recipe on Grocery Mama for a Pumpkin Cake. It reminded me of a pumpkin roll, without the work of having to roll it, so I wanted to give it a try.

In making anything with pumpkin, it is a lot more time consuming than just throwing the ingredients together, especially since I like to use my own pumpkins. Monday night, I brought in a pumpkin, that we picked last weekend, and washed it off. I then broke off the stem, cut it in half and scraped out the insides. I placed the pumpkin, cut sides down, on a cookie sheet and baked it for over an hour. While the pumpkin was baking, I salvaged the seeds. I washed them off, placed them on the toaster oven sheet, seasoned them and baked them for about an hour. (I don't like anything going to waste and Rich loves the seeds!) When the pumpkin was done baking, I scraped out the pumpkin flesh and put it in a container to await being made into a cake.
I decided to make the Pumpkin Cake last night and it sure made a lot! I had imagined that the cake would be baked in a 9x13 pan, but I should have looked a little closer at the recipe. The recipe called for a 12x18 pan, which means the Pumpkin Cake was the size of a sheet cake! That is a lot more cake than a family of four should be eating before it goes bad. I ended up freezing about half the cake in hopes that it will be just as tasty when we dig it out of the freezer the next time we'd like to eat it.

In the end, the Pumpkin Cake turned out delicious! I'm glad I took the time to make it and I'm sure I'll be enjoying it over and over again as we deplete the containers of it in the freezer. It made me excited to work on the next pumpkin recipe, but I think I'll have to wait a while. There is no more room in the freezer to store more of my baked goods :-/.

(If you would like to try the Pumpkin Cake for yourself or your next gathering, just head on over to Grocery Mama for the recipe.)