Cake or pie? Heck, have both in one

This holiday, a Philadelphia bakery is proving you can have your cake – chocolate and vanilla – as well as your apple and pumpkin pies, and eat all of them too.  

The Pumpple Cake has been called The Turducken of the dessert world, and it’s flying off the shelves at the Flying Monkey Bakery in the Reading Terminal Market.

Flying Monkey Bakery owner Elizabeth Halen gives the tale of the tape on this cake, “The 9-inch (diameter) version is…about a foot tall, weighs about 15 pounds…and it costs $75.”Halen says people pass by just to admire the cake she created – with the help of her bakers – back in October.

“It’s a three-day process,” she said.  “We make the pie crusts, we roll out the pie crusts, we put them in the pie tins, we make from scratch pie fillings, par-bake the pies, we make two different cake batters, we sink the pies into the cake batter, top it with more cake batter, cool it over night, and then soak it with simple syrup, crumb coat it, then really frost it and decorate it and chill it and then serve it.”

Oh, that’s all.Halen says people have asked her to send the Pumpple cake as away far as Afghanistan, but she says it doesn’t travel well.   Shoppers here are in luck though.This morning, bakery employee Raina Beresniewicz gave a customer some slicing instructions,”You should cut it with a serated knife in a sawing motion instead of a chopping.  If you try to chop down on ’em, you’ll probably smoosh the insides out.  OK? ‘Cause you’ve got to saw through the pies as well as the cake.”One of those people who will be sawing through the cake, pie and icing is Bryn Mawr resident Shawna Malit, “I’m a really big dessert person so this seems absolutely perfect and i’m really excited,” Malit said. “I’m going to take pictures of it and this is like the highlight of my Thanksgiving, I’ve been really looking forward to it!”If the Pumpple Cake sounds overwhelming, there’s always the smaller option, called the Pumplette.

And, if you’ve been puzzling since the second paragraph over what a turducken is, it’s a Thanksgiving feast that’s a deboned chicken cooked inside a deboned duck, all inside a turkey.  Turduckens were popularized a few years back by former NFL announcer John Madden.