312/365
I don’t even know where to start with this. It’s a monstrosity and a little bit a travesty. Pie. Cake. Pie inside a cake.
It’s a pecan pie inside a chocolate cake, an apple pie in a coffee cake, and a pumpkin pie in a carrot cake.
My leaguemates asked me to make this a couple of weeks ago and I’m a sucker for a good challenge. We had our Season 9 opening party which seemed as good a time as any to give it a shot.
It’s pretty straightforward to make, but a whole heck of a lot of work. First, you bake a pie.
Once that pie has cooled, you make a cake batter. Half of the cake batter goes into the bottom of the pan, then you dump the pie upsidedown into the pan and cover it with the rest of the batter. Then the cake goes into the oven until it’s baked. Then you repeat the process twice more.
I was a little short on time when making this cake so I had to assemble it at the party. It was pretty dark so I had to assemble and ice the three layers in the dark, by light of a cellphone.
photo courtesy of my teammate, Data Die
I ran out of icing though so we had to go with the rustic look, but when it was done, the shear size of this thing was sort of impressive. It didn’t last too long though. Pumpkin pie and carrot cake do not make for a particularly stable cake and an hour after the whole thing was assembled, pie cake started falling. We started slicing it up as it was collapsing and there was a pie cake extravaganza. As Scorey said, “It was sort of a travesty to begin with, so the fact that it collapsed just kind of added to the travesty.” I agree.
The pecan pie and chocolate cake definitely held up the best, but the three flavor combos were pretty good. I was pretty skeptical of this from the beginning, and as a whole, this pie cake was…a lot. It was a lot to handle. I’m not sure that shoving a pie into a cake added to the flavors, but I’m also not sure that it made them worse. I heard a lot of raves about it and others seemed to really enjoy it, so I think the novelty of the whole monstrosity was worth it.