Before we get started, I did post links to what I found helpful. I’m not affiliated with them but it would be nice to be one day. 🙂

Have you ever been asked to participate in a bake sale? The idea of making things within a list may seem daunting but the overall fundraising for activities is the name of the game. If you happen to follow me on my other blog, theartoffinishingblog, you’ll have some idea of my own culinary skills. Personally, I’m set to survival mode.

All. The. Time.

I like to bake and who doesn’t love those cookie icing videos? I could watch those all day. Cooking on the other hand? I know the basics, I adventure little and if you’re a parent, please hear the effort in this: “survive little critics” more than I’ve ever wanted to. Please hear me when I say, “Online recipes, show me your bloopers! Tell me your secrets that you’d rather not publish. Readers actually need them.”

Anyway, this lovely recipe was my crisis-mode-think-on-the-fly for a baked good for an important bake sale. It was for the entire Girl Scout’s unit in our town. They wanted plenty of things that I figured other parents wanted to do, all the while I was doing my best not to have to go to the store again. My plan was to do a pumpkin and sweet potato combination cupcake with all the fixings I would normally do for pumpkin pie. Luckily, I did find one promising combination recipe online by Emily Laurae.

I was super excited to find one that sounded like I could handle it. I mean, it’s not like I haven’t done this type of bake before, just, I needed it from scratch. There were some changes I made to the recipe’s spices because I didn’t have things like ground cardamom, so I gathered up what I would put in pumpkin pie instead as mentioned before.

I have to say, they came out awesome! They were moist and soft. Seriously, they were better than my own go to recipe from years ago and they made writing out the ingredients’ list on the tags we had to make for the bake sale goods so easy!

All that was left to do was add too many steps… hence the sarcasm there. You read that right. Somewhere along the line I started planning to make them into cake pops. Baking community, don’t look at me like that. I’m already embarrassed while I write this.

As you’re most likely aware, they didn’t work. All of that extra research and poor application, despite following Wilton’s directions to put icing into the cooked cake, was for nothing.

Or so I thought.

After watching, not one, but two constructed cake pops slide slowly down their sticks, I decided to carefully remove them. Instead of using sticks, which is a gimmick anyway, (right?) I put the rolled cake bites into cupcake paper cups. From there, I made a spiced chocolate ganache to top them. The spice ingredients I used were Nestle’s semi-sweet morsels, cinnamon, nutmeg, 2% milk, an vanilla extract, for reference.

If I thought the pumpkin and sweet potato cake was good on its own, this certainly elevated it. I would have used the topping in Emily’s recipe and maybe when fall really hits, I’ll go back to it, but man that ganache really made waves.

I’ll certainly be using it again!

The only thing left to do was make corrections on the tag. Because of this new chocolate addition, I was no longer going the glazed cake pop route and now needed to fix it. Cake Bites moved into position and it was time to put my spiffy, new-to-me printer to work.

While every IT worker rolls their eyes at that, including my husband, I remained hopeful and excited. Until I had to go to Staples…because the printer refused to align or use both magenta and yellow inks, but the show must go on. There, a printing rep gracefully helped me without any remarks about whether or not I should know better. I simply said that I was stressed out, closed my eyes, and asked if I could send the image from my email since I (perfectly) forgot the USB drive at home. A lovely twenty minutes from the store, mind you. And she didn’t miss a beat. She read my distress during instructions and walked over to the copier knowing full well that I was blinded by the loss of my time management and mistakes so far.

It was so nice to see a young person being that dedicated to helping me. If I could, I’d leave a gratuity. The five star review code, in my opinion, doesn’t say enough.

After thanking her and collecting my newly printed tags, it was time to get home and cut them out. I know I designed them as circles because of what they were, but for the return of my patience, it would have been better to go with squares.

All in all, my near bake sale disaster turned around to be a beautiful bite of flavor! I will certainly be keeping my tabs open for these baking options for sure.

Spiced Pumpkin & Sweet Potato Cake Bites Recipe

While Emily Laurae pretty much has it down, and I sincerely hope you take a look at her recipe, these were my changes that worked for my cake bites.

Directions:

Let’s get started on the foundation: the cake.

For these cake bites I started with the idea of just baking off the ingredients into cakes. Since I don’t have much in terms of bake ware, I used two different pan types: a bunt cake pan and an 8×8 glass pan. You can use whatever you prefer to bake in.

Preheat your oven to 350 degrees.

Using a paper towel and a tsp of butter, or a nonstick butter spray like Pam, coat the inside of your bake ware. This will make sure your cake is easy to remove after you’ve finished. 

Collect two separate bowls. I’d suggest one medium bowl for the dry ingredients, and one large one for the wet ingredients since we’ll eventually add the dry to the wet.

Now, back to the Dry Ingredients List.

Add all of the below to your medium bowl and mix them together. Since they’re dry and I didn’t need it all over my kitchen, I used a spoon to carefully combine them.

1 ½ Cups (187 g) All-Purpose Flour
1 teaspoon Baking Powder
½ teaspoon Baking Soda
¼ teaspoon Sea Salt
1 teaspoon Ground Cinnamon
1 teaspoon Ground Nutmeg
¼ teaspoon Ground Cloves

Once everything has come together and the mixture is one, brownish blend, set it aside and work with the (Mostly) Wet Ingredients in your large bowl.

1 cup (220 g) Brown Sugar, packed
¼ Cup (57 g) Unsalted Butter, room temperature
¼ Cup (56 g) Canola Oil

I found this to be the best way to do this: First mix brown sugar and butter until brown sugar fully absorbs the butter. It sort of looked like wet brown beads (not fluffy) when it was ready for the Canola Oil. It seemed to fully mix with this method. Dumping all of it together took longer for the ingredients to come together but both work.

Next, add the Wet Ingredients Part 2 into your large bowl.

1 Large Egg, room temperature
½ Cup (125 g) Pumpkin Puree
½ Cup (140 g) Sweet Potato Puree

Beat together until combined. Do not over beat. 

Grab your medium bowl. Add in about a cup at a time from your dry ingredient mixture to the wet ingredient bowl. Beat in dry ingredients until smooth. Do this until all of your ingredients are together evenly.

Pour mixture into baking pans. 

Put cakes into the oven. 

Bake time: 26-31 minutes. Use a knife or toothpick to stick into your bake to check on it. Add time if necessary.

*I have an old oven, and due to my different cake pans, the bundt pan took longer than the glass pan by a whole 15 minutes. This is where knowing your machinery and tools comes in handy. If you’re not sure, getting an oven thermometer is an excellent way to stay on top of your cooking. *

When they’re done, pull out of the oven and let cool on the stove. Wait until fully cooled to remove from pans. This is so that you don’t burn yourself with the next step.

Hooray! On to the next step. 

Now that the cakes have cooled, part each bake into halves. Since I had one bundt pan, I separated it into two halves for that, and two halves for the 8×8 glass pan. 

Line the baking sheet with as many cupcake papers as you can. To start, about twelve sat pretty for me. (At the end when you set the cake bites in them, they’ll sit closer and you can get more on the sheet).

Put aside.

Buttercream Icing Recipe:

Directions:

Sift Confectioners’ Sugar first:

When sifting in a mesh strainer, I found it helpful to shake it from left to right in a tight rhythm. Be careful to move the bowl away from the sifter and check you’re not making more work for yourself by sifting into the already sifted pile of sugar below.

Once the sugar is completely sifted, add butter. Mix until creamy.

Once you’ve completely combined the sugar and butter mixture, add both milk and vanilla extract. Beat until blended.

Hooray! You have your buttercream icing!

This recipe is enough for 2.5 cups.

We’ll be adding in a ratio of:

1 cup of buttercream icing to ½ of the pumpkin sweet potato cake.

Make more icing depending on your cake quantity per halves.  

Now That You Have Both Recipes Made…
Let’s Combine them!

Grab a clean, medium sized bowl, and place both the cake and icing into the bowl.

Once mixed, wash your hands with soap and warm water before returning. If you’re wearing food sanitary gloves you may want to work through it.

Next, since I don’t have a measuring spoon like they do in the video, I pinched out enough of the dough to roll out a ping pong sized ball, about 1.5” in diameter.

Roll the dough so it becomes round (This visual starts at: 3:39) The whole video is super helpful on making cake pops too! I wish I found this one sooner. Another good way to roll the balls is by cupping the sides of your palms together and gently guiding both hands around in tight circles going in the same direction.

Place each balled bite into its own cupcake paper on the baking pan. Push up to fit more as needed.

Working with one half of the cake easily got me 15 – 17 Pumpkin & Sweet Potato Cake Bites.

After completing the other three halves I was closer to about 60 cake bites, which is great for a bake sale!

Set aside.

Spiced Chocolate Ganache Recipe:

Chocolate ganache wound up being my next step. 

Last year my son and I made spiced fudge (recipe soon to come) that I thought would work well this time. Not the fudge, the spices.

Using a mug, I combined all of the ingredients at once and put it in the microwave.

I started melting them at 1 minute, stirred, and repeated for 30 second increments until smooth.

Personally I had to do it two more times because of the thickness of my mug. You may find you need to do the same or more, just be careful and attentive so you don’t burn your chocolate.

I did find that the chunks in the mug smoothed out faster than the ones on the spoon.

If you’re like me and just need the project done, set that spoon to the side and use another one. I know that sounds impatient, but with four hours left to drop off and not a single bite wrapped or labeled, I was feeling my stress climb me like a tree. That was my way of deterring the stress squirrel.

You can always come back to it and make something cool or let it be the chocolate bite you need to get through this day too. Let’s not forget about yourself in the process!

Finally, using a spoon, scoop up dollop amounts and apply to your cake bites. Let gravity take it from here.

If you’re feeling artistic with this, please feel free to load a piping bag and drizzle your ganache instead. I admire your steadfast cool.

This amount of spiced chocolate ganache was more than enough to cover my 54 pieces. I did consider using it for hot chocolate mix after the fact, but alas, it was too warm that day to go through with it. As I write this now though, I certainly will be taking a chance with it later today as fall has certainly surprised us with cool weather now. I’ll keep you posted on this development!

CONGRATULATIONS!!

*****
You finished creating this cake bite!!
Isn’t that great!?

This, very obviously, was a rebound idea. I started with the awesome idea to make pumpkin and sweet potato cake pops, an idea that sounded super fall-esque and would be perfect for our town picnic, especially after sun down when temperatures were meant to cool before the fireworks.

I hoped for a lot of different outcomes with this, mostly, as noted, to be something I didn’t have to go to the store for. I had the ingredients. Quite literally, every single one, and that NEVER happens. 

With my goals in motion I was setting the stage for working on these a couple of days in advance. Two to be transparent. I have another blog where I’m talking a lot about the mental correlation between an activity and finishing it that can be seen here and because of my job and being a mom, juggling time has not always been my strongest capability. In fact, by factoring these things in, I decided doing a test run would also be important. Therefore, baking ahead of time was set into motion. 

Now, in case anyone that happened to be at the town picnic is reading this, rest assured the treats being baked two days early did not put you in jeopardy of any sort of health related issue. Not only did I wear food preparation latex free gloves but your food would keep on the counter for seven days at room temperature, two weeks in the refrigerator, or six weeks in the freezer. All in all, your health and safety was covered during the making of the cake bites. 

I will, however, be setting aside funds for a food processor and cake ball cupping scissors for freaking sure. Watching that one video would have saved me so much time and effort during this project, but for the sake of learning the hard way, I sure put my back into it.

Reflecting on this further, I wish it took more pictures. I wish I didn’t throw away the fallen cake bites, or ate the sad drops from the sticks, or just how well they got stuck in the bag without taking pictures. At the time I was just trying to manage my building stress. 

I did, however, get a picture of the dipped cake pop sticks removed from the cakes and thrown in the sink. 

At first I saw failure, but then I saw a partial opportunity to help the not-quite-a-baker enthusiasts realize they’re not alone. This process can be hard. Daunting even. The hours on your feet to make a morsel is a lot to take on, but if we all could revisit the nailed-it nation, I think we’d be better for it. 

In my honor, I’ll do my best to take pictures of the turning points and new directions because the recipe told me off. I’ll help be the change the internet and people like us need because having fun, actual fun with what we’re learning, takes the edge off. 

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If you do try this recipe, please let me know how it went. I’m excited to hear from you. 

Do you have bloopers to add? A story to tell?

Until next time, I wish you all the best in every endeavor.