Pumpkin S'mores Cake, and a Blogrthday!

Well!  This little slice of the internets is turning two!  Two!  That's two years since the first recipe, vegan chocolate pumpkin cupcakes, went live on the air.  That's roughly 170+ recipes--one a week--since then.  That's roughly 200+ posts, and countless pounds of butter, chocolate, sugar, cream, and flour.

To me, this is amazing.  I can hardly believe it.  I've never been able to keep any consistent journals before in my life.  In grade school, I was always the first to slack off when teachers gave "journal" assignments over the summer or holidays.  Currently, in my old room at my parents' house sit stacks upon stacks of partially-used journals (much to my mom's great frustration), in which I wrote a page or two before giving up and starting anew.  Sure, I have a personal blog that's been on the web since the start of college, but often long months and stretches of time go by without me even logging in at all (and I only really ever log in to have a place to complain and vent).  So really, the fact that desserts for breakfast has been here, week after week, for two long years... I have no idea how this has happened!

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But really, it's amazing, and exciting, and I honestly think that you all, readers and blogging community friends, are to thank for whatever has kept this blog going all this time.  Two years ago, I was extremely lonely, having (relatively) recently moved to a new town and situation.  I so clearly remember standing in my kitchen, woefully longing for a group of friends who were like-minded and understood my baking obsessions and not knowing where in the world I could find such people, though I knew such people must exist!  And by some sheer luck, two years later, here I am now, with so many of you.  :-D  Wonderful!

To celebrate this two-year blogrthday (aka: "blogiversary"), I decided to make a play on the blog's first recipe and remix it with one of the darling desserts of the food blogosphere for a pumpkin s'mores cake.  The cake layers are super moist and airy spiced pumpkin-graham cracker chiffon (made with homemade graham crackers, of course!), alternating with generous mounds of sweet, fluffy toasted marshmallow frosting and a thick glaze of deep, dark chocolate ganache.  This is one of those sticky, melty, and ever so slightly gooey constructions that you end up licking clean off the plate!

These past two years have been absolutely wonderful for me, packed with tons of new experiences and friends and things to learn and foods to eat/bake on the blogosphere.  So, thank you! for making it so wonderful and fantastic, and here's wishing us plenty more butter, flour, chocolate, cream, and sugar to come.



Read on for recipe....

Gimme S'more Cakelettes

As promised: gimme s'more cakelettes!  Oh man, I am so excited about these little individually-sized cakes because they turned out super yummy.  Like, lick-your-own-plate-and-then-reach-over-and-lick-your-neighbor's-plate yummy.  They do take up quite a few steps and components, but let me tell you right now that they are well worth it.  Trust me.

Of course, no s'mores cake would be perfect without baking homemade graham crackers first, which are far deeper and complex in flavor than those store-bought crackers that taste uncannily like the cardboard they come packed in.  In homemade graham crackers, you can actually taste all of that honey and molasses and brown sugar goodness, and they're a must when you're trying to translate the humble s'more into a cake.  Plus, graham crackers are a fantastic snack to have around anyways!

Armed with good graham crackers, let's move on to the cakelettes!  Allow me to break this down for you.  The entire thing is made up of five different layers, packing in all of the graham cracker, chocolate, and marshmallow essence of s'mores that I could into cake form.  At the bottom is a graham cracker genoise, made from powdered graham crackers.  On top of the genoise sits the bulk of the cake: a thick layer of dense, velvety, and rich chocolate souffle cake.  Served at room temperature, the chocolate souffle cake nearly resembles the texture of warmed and melt-in-your-mouth chocolate.  Then comes a thin layer of Italian meringue, topped by an actual graham cracker that is covered with dark chocolate ganache: that's already double the chocolate of a regular s'more, if you're keeping count!  Finally, the whole package comes enveloped in a cloud of sweet and fluffy Italian meringue, seared and browned on the outside into a perfectly and satisfyingly sticky marshmallow-like package.

In addition to capturing the right s'mores flavors in these cakelettes, I also tried to maintain the same smush-iness that you get in eating an actual s'more, too.  With the top layer of chocolate-ganache-covered graham cracker, you get the satisfaction of smashing the crisp graham cracker into the bottom meringue and chocolate layers when you plunge your fork into these cakelettes.  These aren't supposed to be tidy little cakes: they're supposed to evoke the same all-over-your-fingers goodness that you get from real s'mores!  (If you'd like a cleaner cakelette, you can leave the graham crackers out to soften for a day, and they'll be easily cut-able.)

These cakelettes went over as a huge hit at the dinner party where I served them--I kind of wish I'd made more!  Incidentally, too,--and this was completely unplanned--the day I made them also happened to be National S'mores Day.  But really, it would be a shame to save these cakelettes for just one day out of the year!



Read on for the recipe...