I was going to come here and boast about  how great my cake turned out.  But as I have found out  baking is a very tricky  business. A few days ago in the mail came my magazine from "Better home and Gardens" (BHG) and on the cover there  was this Gorgeous! Chocolate and pumpkin Swirl Cake and I knew I wanted to try and make it.( remember I'm a little challenge when it comes to my baking skills) but I was feeling so great after my Nike training class I thought I could do anything Haha...! So here is my experience and my thoughts about this recipe. I got my game face on and  my behind into the kitchen.

On top of boiling pot of water I put a small pot of chocolate on top to melt. I was told it was the best way to do it without burn the chocolate. This part went great.

While my chocolate was melting; I broke two eggs on top of my sugar and  mixed away. As instructed I added butter, Butter milk and vanilla into the mixture.  Note: if I was to ever make this cake again I would  leave the butter out to get to room temperature, it was really hard  to mix it in. (it looked like cottage cheese) Haha!!  The other thing I would do differently is add the butter to the mixture first before I add the butter milk and vanilla or you will get butter fly all over the place.

After I got all my sugar, eggs, on the steps it said, to fold in the pumpkin. Note: I believe this step was very import to fold the pumpkin instead of Mixing which I did. ( I thought fold and mix wouldn't make that much  of a difference but I think it did). The mixture looks fine to me like any other boxed cake batter. I continued to make  my cake by adding my wet ingredients to my dry ingredients.

Note: When you get to step 5 please read this instruction very careful.This is the part I believe everything went wrong "Divide batter in half. Add the melted chocolate and cocoa powder to half of the batter; stir to combine." What I did was take half of the  batter, which I end up pouring into the baking pan instead of a different mixing bowl. what I would do different next time is take half the batter into a different mixing bowl then I would add the the melted chocolate with cocoa and mix  all together. ( same as you are  making a different cake).

You should have seen me at this point I was overconfident , on how everything looked. what could go wrong?

I popped the cake into the over for 55 minutes  on a preheated oven of 350 F. when the time was up I checked on my cake to see if it was done by inserting a toothpick in the middle to see if my cake was  done; it wasn't quite done so I add 15 more minutes. You can't image how amazing! my house was smiling by now.

I was jumping for Joy by now the cake looked great and smells amazing! All I did was  take the cake out of the baking pan, and removed the parchment paper and leave it  cool for 20 minutes. I should have know something was wrong when I was removing  the cake from the baking pan and the parchment paper because the bottom felt heavy and was a little wiggling going on but I just thought the cake is still hot, all it needs is time to cool off.

you should have seen my face when I cut into the cake. Heartbreak!!! the bottom looked like a pie ( Raw cake anyone? Haha..) The weirdest thing is the top layer  of the cake looks cooked. what is a girl to do but only taste  the top layer.

Overall:

No matter my fail when it came to this cake in the future I  would try to  make this cake again. with a lot of help and research from someone who knows what they are doing. This cake is not for beginners like me. you need at least the basics of baking and so on. from what I tasted it tasted good, just imaging if I got all the steps right this cake would be great.  I don't think the cake is bad, I just think the student needs to go back to school. If you know what you are doing I would say give this recipe a go. I am glad I gave this cake a try.

what I have learned: 

1.I over mixed the cake

2.butter needed to be room temperature

3.need to re-read the instructions in the future

4.mixing and folding are two different things

5.Do more research in the future.

6.Maybe to not use Raw brown sugar next time.

Please feel free to leave comments or feedback  of how I can improve or what I could do differently in the future. I would love to do an updated version  of this cake  in the future with all the corrections.

Bye for now.