A couple weeks ago, I made a cake that I had seen floating around on the internet. It wasn’t a high quality cake. It wasn’t made from scratch, it was from a box. I wasn’t even sure I liked the flavor combination. It was just something silly. But I just had to do it!

Behold: A pie-within-a-cake!

The ingredients: Trader Joe’s Pumpkin Pie (already made). Trader Joe’s Chocolate cake mix.

Directions were basically:
1) Prepare cake batter.
2) Put some batter in pan
3) Put pie in batter.
4) Put rest of cake batter.
5) Bake.

How did it turn out? Pretty good! I don’t particularly care for pumpkin pie, but this worked well together. One interesting thing about it: You see the oozing chocolate sauce? That’s not actually a topping, it’s some of the cake batter. It turns out that something about the pumpkin pie filling prevents the cake batter from fully cooking. Not sure if it’s the sugar or moisture, or something else. Anyway, that means that “a toothpick inserted comes out clean” doesn’t work! The cake one the sides ended up getting overcooked, while the inside was a little oozy.

Anyway, it was a fun crazy experiment! I served it to the teachers at my kid’s school and they all raved about it!

-James

I have seen some similar recipe floating around but wasn’t sure of it.  I’m glad you actually made it & could give a personal review.  This sounds like something even I could handle!

  I’m wondering, what are your thoughts on using a cherry pie rather than as pumpkin pie?  I love the cherry-chocolate combo.  Thanks everyone, all thoughts welcome.

Shades of deep fried butter! That looks good.

I saw this the other day..  Its not for me and I have no interest in trying .. Thanks for sharing..

I had heard of these, sort of the pastry equivalent of turducken.  Yours looks much better and tastier than I ever imagined these would be!

I agree on the turducken comparison. And similar to that, you don’t make this cake because you think “I want to make a nice cake.” You make this because you’re like “I feel like a glutton and want to shove as much dessert as possible into a single pan.”

Almonds: as for a cherry pie. I’m not sure I’ve actually had a cherry pie before, but my guess is that a cherry pie filling isn’t super solid. So you’d end up with a jiggly layer inside your cake. Is there a pie crust on top of the pie? If so, that’d provide more support. Might be fun to give it a try! In order to make my life easier, I used a store-bought pie. That’d be an easy way to try it out without investing a lot of time.