Enhanced Tj's Pumpkin Bread Cakey Cake Recipe

Ingredients

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• I've been writing for three hours, very difficult part of the book. It has to be plausible and ridiculous at the same time. It's like surgery. More specifically the scene in the operating room with Woody and Keaton, in SLEEPER, when the Great Leader's body is supposed to reconstitute itself from just a nose. I need bread, sweet bread. The Trader Joe's mixes are like partially finished paintings, a damn fine start really. Tonight it's the pumpkin. I dump a crapload of Saigon cinnamon and pumpkin pie spice in the batter. Then a pile of Hershey's cinnamon chips. Next I pop onto this lovely, very professional looking cook's page--Bluexoxo is her name--and I realize quickly there's no way in hell I'm making legitimate cinnamon icing. I whip out the pumpkin cream cheese (Trader Joe's), a little fake butter, a gob of pumpkin butter (Trader Joes), another crapload of Saigon cinnamon, a lump or four of sugar, a splash of skim milk, and something magic starts happening, just as I envisioned. This is rare. About five - ten minutes to go, so it's time to head outside to the porch to sustain my hideous smoking habit, complemented perfectly by a Sierra Nevada "Tumbler" Autumn Brown ale. God I'm romantic. It's so unimpressive, this pumpkin cake, but it looks as though it might be undeniable as well. shopping list
• Okay, so I burnt the crap out of the top of it, largely because our confection oven is super-charged. But I took my eye off the ball for minute, sitting here thinking about how to express the ratio of the icing below. It's a lesson I'd like to say I've learned, but no doubt I'll get distracted again in the future and burn something that could have turned out near perfect. The bright side is I just chipped that burnt part off and we're looking at viable being the worst case, a 75% from-the-box sensation being the best case. shopping list
• Fuckin'-A-awesome! Now for that beer. shopping list