Pumpple Cake: The Decadent Nesting Doll Of A Dessert

If you've heard of a turducken, you know it's a meaty dish that can drum up both praise and disdain around holidays. Take a boneless chicken, insert it into a duck, then shove those two birds into a boneless turkey; nearly twenty hours later, you have yourself a protein-packed dish to set onto a dinner table, or as Food Network describes it: "One big bird." Now imagine this same kind of gastronomic spectacle intended for a cake recipe.

The Wall Street Journal credits Charles Phoenix with the creation of the dessert form of turducken. It's named the "Cherpumple" and is a smorgasbord of cherry, pumpkin, and apple pies baked into one layered monstrosity. For those with an aversion to cherry pies, Flying Monkey invented the Pumpple Cake, a tiered cake that contains pumpkin and apple pies baked into cake layers and slathered with classic vanilla buttercream frosting. The cake is served seasonally at the bakery, from October until January, but we're here to help you make your own any time of the year.

The Pumpple cake could be the answer to those annoying family dessert deliberations, as Parade suggests. Instead of choosing which pie or cake to serve after dinner, cram them all into one dish, and prepare to present the whopping pieces for guests to admire with trepidation, wonder, and awe.

A slice of this cake will set you back $8, or you can carry an entire cake home for $75, records Philadelphia Magazine. However, the outlet describes the dessert as a "stunt food," — like pretzels stuffed with cheesesteaks or deep-fried beer — that seems more focused on marketing than a culinary experience. Fine Cooking wasn't entirely convinced with the concept of a Pumpple but came across a classic pumpkin pie recipe baked inside cream cheese vanilla cupcakes and was converted.

If you think the Pumpple cake is an overtly decadent creation, you're not alone. Elisabeth Halen, who owns the Flying Monkey Bakery in Philadelphia, told The Wall Street Journal, that the cake boasts a cool 1800 calories. Although she sells out quickly, some customers "feel the need to tell [her] how disgusting it is," adding, "I don't care. I am a baker, not a health-food nut."

Bakers must ensure both pie and cake are cooked through, warns Atlas Obscura. This means pies should be pre-baked before being set into tins filled with doughy cake batters. The goal is for each layer of cake to be baked to perfection so that each bite is moist and flavored. 

As you can imagine, making this beast of a cake takes planning. The original cake's creator showed audiences how to assemble the monstrosity on the Rachel Ray Show and used deep cake pans to place store-bought pies into boxed cake mixtures. If you're going through the trouble of baking pies from scratch, you'll need to focus on making the best apple pies and pumpkin pies you can muster before attempting the cake part of this ordeal. Consider it a labor of love.

Once you have the general idea of how to place a pie into cake mix, you can experiment with combinations of pies and cake flavor to your heart's — and stomach's — content.