Adventures in Creating a Cherpumple Pie Cake — Ridiculous Photojournalism

Here’s an old post from my blog, that I’m dismantling and moving pieces from over to here.

The Cherpumple Pie Cake is the creation of humorist and ambassador of Americana, Charles Phoenix. It’s a crazy holiday dessert inspired by the Turducken. For the sake of brevity, I’ll paste his definition in here, but without the typo:

“The Cherpumple is the dessert version of the Turducken. It’s a three-layer cake with a pie stuffed in each layer. YUM! Cherpumple is short for CHERry, PUMpkin and apPLE pie. The apple pie is baked in spice cake, the pumpkin in yellow and the cherry in white. I DARE YOU TO TRY IT AT HOME!…& SEND PIX! Share your Cherpumple “Monster” Pie Cake creation!”

While amusing, I was not going to try making one because I am not a baker. However at the bottom of the recipe, Charles says you can set your final product on fire. WHOA… fire? Anytime there is an opportunity to set food on fire where it actually counts as on purpose, I’m interested. It saves me having to come up with excuses for doing it anyway.

I decided on a Cherpeaple pie. Cherry, peach, and apple. I know Charles added pumpkin, but I don’t like pumpkin, and this is more fun to say. If somebody says ‘what’s in it?’ you can raise your eyebrows knowingly and then ask where one of the guests disappeared to. See, tons of fun.

I put chocolate cake mix around the cherry pie, yellow cake mix around the peach pie, and just to add a touch of class, white ‘funfetti’ cake on the apple pie. For those not in the know, white ‘funfetti’ cake mix is like white cake mix except it’s full of sprinkles that melt in the oven, making it appear as though your cake is riddled with bits of brightly colored plastic.

It all started out innocently enough:

As instructed, I poured cake mix on top of each thawed and cooked pie. A summary of disasters:

Disaster #1: I forgot to add oil to the chocolate cake. Oh well, it probably will come out fine anyway right?

Disaster #2: The apple pie was reluctant to leave its home in pie tin #1 and join the cake mix in pie tin #2.