Better Than Pumpkin Pie? Fall Recipe Swap!

Welcome back to Nancy's Home Style Kitchen. Today, I have a special episode for you where I team up with Mary Catherine from Mary Catherine's Table. Now, she claims that this pumpkin crunch cake is better than pumpkin pie. So, we decided to do a recipe swap. While I'm here in Idaho trying out her pumpkin crunch cake, she's down in Alabama filming for her channel one of my favorite fall recipes. Let's go over all the ingredients that you'll need for this cake. You'll need a 10 ounce can of evaporated milk, 15 ounce can of pumpkin, four eggs, one cup of granulated white sugar. For the spices, you need some nutmeg, cinnamon, and cloves, or you can use pumpkin pie spice. I'll go over more detail when we're adding them. You need one teaspoon of salt, a classic yellow cake mix, one cup of chopped pecans. We're gonna need one cup of melted butter, so that's equivalent of two sticks, eight ounces of cream cheese, an eight ounce tub of whipped topping, and one half cup of confectioners or powdered sugar. So, to get started with the pumpkin layer, we're gonna go ahead and add the one 15 ounce can of pumpkin to a bowl. We're gonna add in one cup of granulated sugar, four eggs, we need one 10 ounce can of evaporated milk. I have one teaspoon of salt. So, here's where you have some options. You can add one to two teaspoons of pumpkin pie spice, or you could make your own pumpkin pie seasonings. So, I have one and a half teaspoons of cinnamon, and I have about an eighth to a quarter teaspoon of cloves. So, to me, cloves can become very overpowering, so I like to use a little bit less, but you can totally adjust that to your taste. And then you need to go in with some nutmeg. I love the flavor of fresh grated nutmeg, so I'm gonna do about a quarter teaspoon. That smells like fall. Okay, so now we just wanna whisk this up. So, a couple months ago, I reached out to a new YouTube channel that I discovered, Mary Catherine's Table, and I just wanted to connect with another fellow YouTuber. And what I loved about her channel is that her recipes are very similar to mine as far as home-style cooking. We're both sharing a passion for a love of cooking. And her and her husband, Darren, actually filmed together. And with my husband and I filming together, it just seemed like a great match. Well, we started talking, and we did a couple video conference calls, and we decided to do a fall recipe swap. Okay, that is blended very well. And now we need to add this to our baking dish. I have my oven preheated to 350 degrees, and I buttered the baking dish. You could use butter or a cooking spray, whatever you like. And we're just gonna pour this mixture into the dish. Now that we have our pumpkin base layer completed, we're gonna go in with the cake mix. So Mary Catherine uses a yellow cake mix. You can also use a spice cake mix if you like more additional spice. But I'm gonna go with how she made it and just use the yellow cake mix. So with this, you just wanna sprinkle it across the top of the pumpkin layer. You don't wanna mix it in. It just needs to sit on top. We'll set this over to the side. I'm just gonna take a spatula and just try to even it out a bit because I wanna make sure I have the cake mix in all the corners and it's as even as possible. Sometimes it's shaking out of that pouch, a little clumpy. Okay, next step is one cup of chopped pecans. Now, you guys know I always toast my pecans before I use them. However, these pecans are sitting on top of this cake mix and this is gonna be in the oven for quite some time. So these are gonna just be able to toast on their own while this baking process happens. So we don't need to toast them before. If we did, they'd probably turn out overdone. So we just wanna do a nice sprinkled layer. I'm gonna reserve a little bit of these pecans to put on top of the topping. And then here are the two sticks of butter that I have melted and we just wanna pour this over the top. Now, this crunchy layer that is gonna form on top of this is what Mary Catherine says takes this from just traditional pumpkin pie to over the top with just this nice crunchy layer. And if you've been around here and you've watched me, you know, pie crust is not my specialty. So I'm super excited to have an easier way to be able to make something that's reminiscent of pumpkin pie, but much easier. Okay, this is all there is to it. We're gonna go ahead and pop this in the oven. Again, it's preheated to 350 degrees and we're gonna bake it for 55 minutes. So now we're gonna make the cream cheese topping. So I have one block of cream cheese that I had set out coming up to room temperature just to soften a bit. It's not completely warm, but it's not straight out of the refrigerator either. And I'm gonna use my mixer, put on the paddle attachment and I wanna beat this until it's smooth. Okay, I'm gonna scrape down the side. Okay, that is nice and soft. Let me show you what it looks like. Now we're gonna add in 1 1⁄2 cup of confectioner's sugar or powdered sugar. Start it out on low and then go ahead and get this going for another minute or two until it's nice and creamy. Okay, next thing is to add our whipped topping. So you can use the Cool Whip or another brand of whipped topping. Or if you wanna use your own homemade whipped cream, you can certainly do that. When I was talking to Mary Catherine, she said it's actually really, really good. And this tub is about three cups. So if you're doing that, just know you're gonna need about three cups of homemade whipped cream. But this is just a quick and simple option. That's all there is to it. Very, very simple, but I know it's gonna taste delicious. I like a cream cheese type frosting. And I think that's gonna just be a little something different with this pumpkin crunch cake. Because normally when I have pumpkin pie, we just put whipped cream on it. So I can imagine how good the addition of the cream cheese and a little bit of that powdered sugar is gonna be. Okay, all we have left to do is frost our cake. I've allowed the cake to cool completely. It took about a good hour and a half because the thickness of the pumpkin and the cake. And you just wanna make sure it's completely cool before you go in and add your cream cheese frosting, which is what we're gonna do now. So I'm gonna put this on in a couple different areas. And I'm gonna use an offset spatula. I love these for doing things like this, like frosting, because then you're not dragging your knuckles through the frosting. We just wanna get a nice even layer. I say that and I just stuck my finger in the frosting. Then I have our reserved pecans and I'm just gonna do a sprinkle of the pecans over the top. And this is optional. You can do as much or as little as you want. But it does kind of let the person know who's gonna be digging in. Give them a little taste of what to expect. So here we go. Here is our pumpkin crunch cake. So let's cut a piece so we can give it a try. I've been looking forward to this all day. I'm gonna run my knife around the edge. Even though I buttered it, I want a nice clean piece to come out. Yum. Can you see that? Layers of pumpkin. There's definitely a layer of that crunchy cake and then that cool cream cheese topping. So we're doing something a little different today. This is my husband, Paul. Hello. So you've probably heard him behind the camera either laughing at me, making comments or whatever. But I couldn't do any of this if it wasn't for him. So thank you for being along on the journey. And now Paul notoriously does not like pumpkin pie. So every holiday, my mom is making him a cherry pie. So this is the ultimate taste test. So I want you to try it first. Okay. So I'm the first to admit pumpkin is not my thing, but I'm willing to give this a try. Of course it's good. It's not strong like pumpkin pie and you can really taste everything. Oh, that's actually really good. So is it the cake? Do you think the crunchy cake topping is what changes it for you? Or is it just not that overly pumpkin pie consistency? I think it's just not solid pumpkin. It's like a mix. You got cake, you got the icing. You do get a little bit of the pumpkin, but I don't mind it. It's not strong. That's actually really good. It's not overly pumpkin. I don't think it is. Not as much as like pumpkin pie. It can be so heavy on the pumpkin flavor and the spices. This is just really nice, crunchy and subtle. And it may. Yeah, that's really good. It may have taken the place of pumpkin pie or I might actually now be able to make this and I can enjoy pumpkin pie. You will enjoy it. And then we can still make you cherry pie anyway. Of course. Okay. Thanks, mom. Thank you for everything that you do behind the scenes. Always. Thank you for being the face. I'm so glad you liked it. Good. Okay. I'm sure that was a little awkward for my husband, never having been in front of the camera before. And now the first time he is, I'm asking him to try something that historically he doesn't care for. But that was his honest reaction and he actually really, really loves it. So thank you, Mary Catherine, for such a wonderful recipe. I will have Mary Catherine's recipe on her website linked in the description box. I'll also have her YouTube channel as well as a link to what she's making, which is one of my favorite fall recipes. If you're joining me for the first time from Mary Catherine's table, welcome and thank you for watching. I'd love to hear where you're watching from. So please give me a comment and let me know. I would love to say hello. Your next step is to head over to Mary Catherine's channel and see which of my fall recipes she selected to make. If you enjoyed spending time with me in the kitchen today and love simple, affordable home-style recipes, I'd love it if you would subscribe. If you like this type of content, please hit that like button. And as always, I will be back next week with another recipe from my kitchen.