Tag: frosting

Categories
Dessert

Combo recipe is piece of cake and easy as pie

A pumpkin pie cake can be made completely with pre-packaged ingredients but tastes homemade, making it a great dessert for anyone who isn’t a big fan of baking.
A pumpkin pie cake can be made completely with pre-packaged ingredients but tastes homemade, making it a great dessert for anyone who isn’t a big fan of baking.

One of my unofficial New Year’s resolutions each year is to try to use up the random ingredients hiding in my pantry.

In this case, one of the culprits was a large can of pumpkin pie filling that I bought by mistake, thinking I found a great deal on plain canned pumpkin.

It’s been staring at me, mocking me, for months, but I’m happy to report that the can is officially off the shelf and into this week’s recipe, which was a tasty and super easy dessert to make. If you don’t consider yourself much of a baker, stow this one away for the future, because this one take absolutely zero skill to create.

This comes from the blog “The Country Cook” by Brandie Skibinski. You can find the original post at https://www.thecountrycook.net/pumpkin-pie-cake/. I added cinnamon and swapped out salted butter in my version.

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Pumpkin Pie Cake

A pumpkin pie cake can be made completely with pre-packaged ingredients but tastes homemade, making it a great dessert for anyone who isn’t a big fan of baking.
Course Dessert
Keyword cake mix recipe, cinnamon, cream cheese icing, dump cake, easy baking, easy dessert, frosting, pumpkin pie, pumpkin pie filling, spice cake, spice cake mix

Ingredients

  • 30 ounces pumpkin pie filling
  • 4 eggs
  • 1 box spice cake mix
  • 1 cup butter melted
  • 1 teaspoon salt
  • 1 container frosting I used cream cheese
  • cinnamon for sprinkling

Instructions

  • Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Prepare a nine-by-13-inch baking pan by spraying it with cooking spray, and set it aside.
  • Beat the pie filling and eggs until the mixture is smooth. Add in the cake mix, butter and salt, and beat until everything is well combined.
  • Pour the batter into the prepared pan and spread it evenly.
  • Bake for 45 to 55 minutes or until the center is completely set.
  • Let it cool completely before icing it, and then sprinkling it lightly with cinnamon. Store in an airtight container.

As you can see, this really is a super easy recipe, mostly because it’s made with all pre-made ingredients. But the combination really elevates all of it. The pumpkin pie filling gives the cake just a little bit of a pie texture, which was really nice.

And I received the added benefit of getting that huge can of pumpkin pie filling out of my pantry, along with a long-forgotten cake mix and the container of frosting. Win-win-win.

Hopefully, as I continue to dig through my shelves over the next couple of months, I will be able to find more treasures that work out just as well. And hopefully I’ll read labels a little better in 2025 so I don’t find myself in this same mess next January.

This piece first appeared in print Jan. 23, 2025.

Spice Up Your Life is a weekly newspaper column written by Lindsey Young in south central Kansas. If you are interested in sponsoring this column, please contact us through the “Contact Lindsey” link at the top of the page.

Categories
Cookies Dessert

Sugar cookies had me at ‘Jell-O’

Jell-O sugar cookies with Jell-O frosting can be made in every color of the rainbow.
Jell-O sugar cookies with Jell-O frosting can be made in every color of the rainbow.

A few months ago, Joey and I moved into a new house, and I must confess that my pantry is still an absolute mess.

I often reference my pantry in this column, but up until we moved, my “pantry” has always been a large, open bookshelf in my kitchen, so a lot of my food items are tucked into containers and baskets to give it all the semblance of organization.

Now I have an entire, floor-to-ceiling cabinet, and I haven’t quite figured out how to get it into a state I’m proud of yet.

While digging for some rarely used Christmas spices, I came across a stash of gelatin, which I totally forgot existed. I added it to another stack of Jell-O I already had, wondering how and why I had so many boxes of the stuff, when I don’t really use it all that often.

(If someone understands the finer points of gelatin reproduction, you might enlighten me.)

But, in following with my new resolve to rid my pantry of its overabundance, I found a recipe that let me use up two whole boxes of gelatin, which I was pretty excited about.

I found a cookie recipe on the blog “Family Cookie Recipes.” You can find it at https://familycookierecipes.com/jello-sugar-cookies/ .The author suggests a frosting recipe, too, but I decided to go a different direction. The frosting recipe I used came from “Little Delights Cakes.” You can find that one at http://littledelightscakes.com/jello-frosting/. The recipe author notes that sugar-free Jell-O shouldn’t be used for making this. My only changes were to add a bit more vanilla to the frosting and bring these two great recipes together.

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Jell-O Sugar Cookies

Jell-O sugar cookies with Jell-O frosting can be made in every color of the rainbow.
Course Dessert
Keyword colorful, cookies, frosting, gelatin, Jell-O

Ingredients

Cookie Ingredients

  • 1 cup butter softened
  • 1 cup sugar
  • 3 ounces Jell-O any flavor
  • 3 eggs
  • 3 cups flour
  • 1 teaspoon baking powder
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt

Frosting Ingredients

  • 3 ounces Jell-O any flavor
  • 2/3 cup sugar
  • 1-1/2 teaspoon vanilla
  • 1 egg white
  • 1/2 cup boiling water

Instructions

  • For the cookies, preheat the oven to 375 degrees.
  • Cream the butter and sugar together until smooth, and then beat in the Jell-O.
  • Beat the eggs in until the mixture is smooth, and then finish out by beating in the dry ingredients.
  • When everything is well-incorporated, scoop the dough by the tablespoon onto a prepared cookie sheet, spacing them about two inches apart.
  • Bake for 8 minutes or until the edges just start to brown.
  • Let the cookies cool completely before frosting them.
  • For the frosting, combine the Jell-O, sugar, vanilla and egg white in a mixing bowl and beat together until they’re well combined.
  • Add in the boiling water and beat the mixture for about 7 minutes to get the frosting nice and fluffy. To make it easier to spread on the cookies, refrigerate it for about 30 minutes to let it set up a bit.
  • Spread or pipe the frosting onto the finished cookies and store them in an airtight container. (Fair warning: this frosting is more like a whipped cream, so it won’t harden, and you won’t be able to stack the finished cookies.)

These were really good. I had an overabundance of strawberry gelatin, so that’s what I used for both the cookies and the frosting, but you could use any flavor combination that sounds good to you.

I also wondered if you could make two different colors and swirl the dough together to get a fun look.

It felt nice to get a couple items cleaned out of the pantry, but I’m still going to need to get to work on my food organization. There may be even more surprises just waiting to be discovered.

This piece first appeared in print on Jan. 2, 2020.

Spice Up Your Life is a weekly newspaper column written by Lindsey Young in south central Kansas. If you are interested in sponsoring this column, please contact us through the “Contact Lindsey” link at the top of the page.

Categories
Dessert

You (pe)can’t miss out on German chocolate icing

German chocolate cake is really all about that gooey, coconut-and-pecan-filled frosting.
German chocolate cake is really all about that gooey, coconut-and-pecan-filled frosting.

Up until I married Joey, German chocolate cake was a dessert I was vaguely aware of but not one I’d eaten very often.

But it’s Joey’s absolute favorite—the flavor he chose for his groom’s cake at our wedding, in fact—so it’s become something I’ve had more often over the years.

Since Joey recently celebrated a birthday, I decided to bake him one.

In doing some research, I discovered that it gets its name not from its country of origin but from the guy who created the baking chocolate first used in it: Sam German.

According to a 2007 article from NPR, the German chocolate cake was first popularized in 1957 when the recipe was sent in to a Dallas newspaper, and it’s been going strong ever since.

The website “What’s Cooking, America?” gives the original credit to Mrs. George Calay, but if you search online for a German chocolate cake recipe, you’ll find dozens of versions now.

That being said, the recipe I’m sharing with you is just for the from-scratch frosting for a German chocolate cake. I just like using my favorite chocolate cake recipe with the frosting. It would easily jazz up a boxed cake mix, too.

I found this recipe on the blog “Wives with Knives.” It also includes a from-scratch chocolate cake recipe that I didn’t try. You can find it at http://www.wiveswithknives.net/2011/08/19/made-from-scratch-german-chocolate-cake/. I doubled the vanilla in my version.

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German Chocolate Icing

German chocolate cake is really all about that gooey, coconut-and-pecan-filled frosting.
Course Dessert
Cuisine German
Keyword coconut, frosting, German chocolate, icing

Ingredients

  • 4 egg yolks
  • 12 ounces evaporated milk
  • 3 teaspoons vanilla
  • 1 1/2 cups sugar
  • 3/4 cup butter
  • 7 ounces coconut
  • 1 1/2 cups chopped pecans

Instructions

  • Whisk together the egg yolks, milk and vanilla in a large saucepan. Add the sugar and butter and cook over medium heat until the mixture thickens and becomes golden brown (this will take a little while), stirring regularly.
  • Remove the mixture from the heat and stir in the coconut and nuts. Let the mixture cool until it’s thick enough to spread on a cake or cupcakes.

One thing to note about making this frosting is that (for me, at least) it takes a decent amount of time for the mixture to thicken in the pot. It feels like you’ll be stirring forever, and then it’s just suddenly done.

We enjoyed this recipe and brought the leftovers to share with the staff during production night for the newspaper, which went over really well.

Happy birthday, Joey!

This piece first appeared in print on March 1, 2018.

Spice Up Your Life is a weekly newspaper column written by Lindsey Young in south central Kansas. If you are interested in sponsoring this column, please contact us through the “Contact Lindsey” link at the top of the page.

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