Pumpkin Cake with Cream Cheese Frosting
This pumpkin cake is based off of my popular pumpkin cupcake recipe, with just a few tweaks to make it suitable as a layer cake. It’s perfect for fall birthdays, Halloween parties, and of course, Thanksgiving (have you planned your menu yet?!). Everyone will love how sweet (but a balanced, not overpowering sweet), soft, and moist this recipe is! I chose to frost mine with cream cheese frosting (I don’t know about you, but to me, the two are inseparable), but some other good options include Swiss meringue buttercream, vanilla frosting, or even brown butter frosting. While I’m usually a frosting fanatic, I think a thin layer here pairs perfectly with this richly flavored cake (and it looks so pretty this way too!). You’re just an hour away from a slice of sweet, spiced goodness… let’s get started!
What You Need
There’s quite a few ingredients up there, so I’ll highlight the important ones:
Unsalted butter. I opt for unsalted butter so that I have 100% control of the salt flavor in this recipe. If you only have salted butter on hand, see my post on substituting salted for unsalted butter. Pumpkin puree. Use plain, 100% pumpkin puree. Pumpkin pie filling looks very similar and is sold in the same section of the grocery store, but it includes spices and additives that we don’t want in our pumpkin cake. I’m starting to sound like a control freak, but we want to have complete control over the spice and sweetness of our cake, not rely on whatever Libby happened to add to that can! Cream cheese. Use brick-style, full-fat cream cheese for your frosting. Powdered sugar. You may notice this recipe has a little less sugar than my traditional cream cheese frosting; this makes the frosting a bit silkier, which I love here. You can vary the amount of sugar you use based on whether your frosting needs to be thinner (good for sheet cakes) or thicker (best for layer cakes). If you’re looking for an even thinner/softer frosting, you can reduce the sugar to 2.5 cups.Vanilla. A bit of vanilla extract flavors our frosting nicely. To be honest, I really love to use a scraped vanilla bean in this recipe, but they’re just SO expensive right now, so extract it is!
SAM’S TIP: Using butter and oil makes this pumpkin cake both flavorful and moist. I don’t recommend substituting one for more of the other–you need both for the perfect balance! Remember, this is just an overview of the ingredients I used and why. For the full recipe please scroll down to the bottom of the post!
How to Make Pumpkin Cake
SAM’S TIP: Once you are ready to combine the wet and dry ingredients, switch over to a spatula. Using a mixer for this part could cause your pumpkin cake to become too dense or dry. This pumpkin cake officially wraps up my pumpkin recipes for this year. I hope you enjoyed them all 🧡 Enjoy! Let’s bake together! I’ll be walking you through all the steps in my written recipe and video below! If you try this recipe, be sure to tag me on Instagram, and you can also find me on YouTube and Facebook
Related Recipes
Note: I originally shared this recipe in 2017. I’ve added new photos and a video and have updated the text, but the recipe remains the same!
