This pumpkin cake with maple cream cheese frosting is spiced with cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, and cloves. All the essential pumpkin spice flavors tempered with the creamy coolness of cream cheese frosting. One of our most popular cakes.
What to do if your frosting isn't quite as fluffy as you'd like
Folks rave about this maple-cream cheese frosting. Rightly so. But it can tend to be a bit on the soft side—as in, perhaps a little too soft if the cake needs to sit out for a few hours in a warm kitchen. (And by “a warm kitchen,” we mean a kitchen in which the Thanksgiving turkey is roasting and all four burners are blasting come Thanksgiving morning.) This is easily remedied by plopping an extra stick of butter in the recipe. (Isn’t it lovely how butter can fix all manner of problems?!) The result is a sturdier frosting, with no sacrifice in flavor, that’s able to withstand sitting out for several hours in any climate. If you’re one of those people who are averse to more calories, get your hands on the darker, more robust maple syrup formerly known as Grade B and recently redesignated as “Grade A Dark Color, Robust Taste,” the frosting magically holds up like a champ and requires no extra butter.
Pumpkin Cake With Maple–Cream Cheese Frosting
Ingredients
- For the pumpkin cake
- For the maple cream–cheese frosting
Directions
Crank the heat to 350° (175°C). Position a rack in the middle of the oven and butter two 8-by-2-inch cake pans and line them with parchment circles cut to fit the pans. Butter the parchment and coat the pan with flour, tapping out any excess. (You can instead spritz the pans with cooking spray for baking, if that’s easier for you than buttering and flouring.)
In a bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, cloves, salt, and pepper until well combined. Take a whiff. Heaven.
In the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with a paddle attachment or in a large bowl using a good old-fashioned hand mixer on medium speed, beat the butter, dark brown sugar, and granulated sugar until fluffy, about 5 minutes.
Plop the eggs, 1 at a time, into the bowl, beating and scraping down the sides of the bowl after each addition. Alternate adding the flour and buttermilk mixtures to the bowl, starting and ending with the flour.
Dump in the pumpkin and beat just until the pumpkin is incorporated and the cake batter is smooth.
Spoon the batter into the prepared cake pans, dividing it evenly. Give each filled pan a good smack flat against the counter to release any air bubbles. (Simply hold the pan a couple inches above your countertop and drop it. Trust us. It works.)
Bake the cakes until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean, 30 to 40 minutes. Let the cakes cool in the pans on a wire rack for 10 minutes. Carefully turn out the cakes from the pans onto the wire rack, peel off the parchment paper, turn them right side up, and let them cool completely.
In the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment or in a bowl using a good old-fashioned hand mixer on medium speed, beat the cream cheese, butter, confectioners’ sugar, and maple syrup until fluffy.
To assemble the whole shebang, place a cake layer on a plate or cake stand and generously frost the top of it. Place the other cake on top and frost the sides and top, swirling the frosting like the pro that you are. If the frosting seems a touch on the soft side, slip the cake in the fridge for at least 30 minutes until the frosting is set or, if you notice it before you frost the cake, see our note above the recipe. Originally published May 10, 2009.
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I will try it next week :)
Great! Do let us know how it turns out, Valeria.
Is it Thanksgiving yet?! I love pie, but I think I need a bowl of this frosting + a spoon! Butter!!
I couldn’t agree more, Elsa!
This cake is a keeper. Full of flavor with perfect texture, I baked this cake a few days in advance of my grandson’s baptism. I easily split each layer to create a 4-layer stacked cake. I filled the layers with a pumpkin cheesecake buttercream and frosted with the maple cream cheese recipe presented here. I made a stiffer marshmallow decorative frosting. Guests were swooning over this cake.
Lisa, the cake looks gorgeous! But I would expect no less from a baker who won the Pillsbury Bake-Off as well as “Chopped” on Food Network!
You don’t know how much I appreciate your well-tested recipes. Can’t go wrong with this web site unlike some others. I grabbed a photo of the inside at last moment. I highly recommend this cake.
Can you give us the pumpkin buttercream recipe? This cake looks amazing!
Just add 1/3 cup of puréed pumpkin and some pumpkin pie spice or cinnamon to your favorite cream cheese frosting
Thank you Lisa! I can’t wait to make this recipe for my family!
Thanks, Lisa!
Yes, we’d love to have the recipe, Lisa, if you’re willing to share it with us.
Lisa, well, I think we just need to consider this one a collaboration. You added your own amazing-sounding filling and you split the layers, making the cake moister with more filling! Maybe…you need to think of becoming a tester for us!
I’d love to try this cake in a bundt pan…what are your thoughts on that?
Jk, I don’t think it would work. The cake is quite delicate. Bundt pans call for a sturdier cake.
Sweets are not my weakness, and I especially do not like layer cakes. I also hate pumpkin pie so desserts for Thanksgiving, which I host, are always a problem. I have made linzertorte and gingerbread, but someone is always disappointed that there isn’t something pumpkin on the table. When I saw this recipe, I thought it might be the answer! I like small cakes, so I cut this recipe in half and made a single layer cake with the frosting. Except for halving, I didn’t change any of the ingredients. I wanted to use a hand mixer rather than my stand mixer, and I blitzed the butter and sugars in my food processor (so they weren’t flying all over the place). Then I put that mixture in a bowl and used my hand mixer to do the rest. Stella Parks of BraveTart recommends using cake pans with 3-inch high sides. She likes Fat Daddio’s; I like Parrish Magic Line, and that is what I used. As my oven is well insulated, the cake was done at the 30-minute mark. The result was a beautiful and perfectly DELICIOUS cake, which will definitely become part of my Thanksgiving repertoire. Thanks so much for devising this wonderful recipe. And Happy Thanksgiving 2018!
Victoria, high praise indeed, if you’re not a layer-cake and pumpkin fan! Thank you! I wish you and yours a very Happy Thanksgiving.