Cake Invention

I had a vision while driving from St. Louis this morning. A pumpkin cake with cranberry filling and pecan topping. I imagined one of those beautiful layer cakes with like five skinny cake layers alternating with sweet cranberry sauce (might look something like this). When I got home and told Kasey about it he said "make it!" and I did... well sort of.

I gathered some ingredients. I thought, why not just get some spice cake mix and replace the oil with pumpkin? I also really wanted to incorporate pecans so I got some coconut pecan frosting.

The recipe on the box says mix three eggs, 1/3 cup oil, 1 and 1/3 cup water and cake mix and bake at 350. I made a few adjustments.

At first I just put in 2/3 cup of pumpkin, three eggs, 1 cup milk and cake mix but when I beat it up the batter was kind of thick. It was a little more like wet cookie batter. I added the rest of the can of pumpkin and then about half a cup of water. Some more mixing and it was the perfect consistency.

Baked in a 13x9 pan at 350 degrees for 35 minutes made a cake that looked like this (also covered with frosting):

The cake was SUPER moist as you can clearly see (so moist it's kind of settling to the bottom).

This was the experimental round and I have learned how I want to change it up. I wanted to try to make something like this for Thanksgiving... I will update on the fancy version next week.

Also, I realize that pumpkin spice cake has been made by others. BUT I invented this in my own mind because I didn't follow a recipe, just went with my instincts... and sort of the directions on the box but I refuse to let that diminish my achievements.