Pumpple cake (Flying Monkey Bakery)

Does anyone else remember that show "Pimp My Ride" in which the cultural hip-hop icon Alvin Nathaniel Joiner IV (better known as Xzibit) would take sorry-ass excuses for vehicles and pump them full of electronics worth well more than the sticker price of a brand new car? Yeah, that was some quality television. Perhaps the one good thing to come from that show was this awesome meme where Xzibit puts stuff inside of stuff so you can do stuff while you do other stuff. I wrote that and I'm not even sure if it makes sense. Why is this even relevant to food? Well... somewhere along the line, someone decided that Americans weren't fat enough. The solution to this grave injustice? Yo dawg, I heard you like to eat pie so we baked a pie in your ca... yeah I won't even bother... it's a pumpkin pie baked inside of a chocolate cake stacked with an apple pie baked inside of a vanilla cake frosted with vanilla buttercream that gets covered with rainbow sprinkles. Bitches love rainbow sprinkles. That's about as America as you can get.



what wonders lie inside this magical box?

Disappointingly, what I got was not pumpple cake. Apparently pumpkin puree is crazy expensive outside of Fall (screw you simple economics), so they make seasonal variants of their layered monstrosity. For Spring/Summer they substitute out the pumpkin pie for strawberry pie. So it's really a "strampple" cake? I don't know. I don't care. All that really matters is that the only thing standing between me and 1800 calories of cake-pie mashup is a flimsy cardboard box. I like those odds. Cardboard... ain't... shit.



A slice of pumpple/strampple... whatever you want to call it... will run you $9. Most people aren't as cheap as I am, and I realize how much prep work and time goes into making each one of these things, but goddamn. That's a lot to pay for a single slice of cake. That's the equivalent of 3 doughnuts from Doughnut Plant (or as a lot of my female friends call it... DP facepalm) or even crazier... something like 15 doughnuts from Donuts Plus! Do you know how much pleasure 15 French crullers can bring me? Unspeakable pleasure. Peep this, I'll quantify it for you. This cake is 1800 calories per slice. That is 200 calories per US dollar. If an average French Cruller has 250 calories, 15 doughnuts has 3750 calories, or 417 calories per US dollar. If there is a strong correlation between calories and deliciousness in baked goods (and I suspect there is), the cost efficiency of pumpple/strampple is less than half of that with doughnuts. In other words... this cake had to be tantalizingly delicious. With that kind of price tag, expectations... are basically impossible to meet. But I've been surprised before so...



For the first half of the equation, the strawberry pie/chocolate cake combo. I'm not the biggest fan of strawberry. Something about all those seeds sloshing around in my stomach just isn't kosher with me. Plus it just all seems so slutty. All the other fruits are perfectly okay with keeping their privates hidden inside, but nooooo... Ms. Strawberry has to go around giving up the goods prior to purchase. Strawberries... they are morally defective. Also they're kind of tart and not as sweet as other fruits so I don't find them as palatable in pies. Flying Monkey's was okay. The crust is nice and moist... slightly dense, but not unappetizing. The cake? Super heavy in chocolate flavor with a rich darkness that stayed around for a while after eating. Put together, this half was pleasantly mellow on flavor. Just a nice smooth mixture of sweet and tart.



The other half? It's a standard apple pie with vanilla cake. The pie itself is pretty generic. It uses the same crust (unsurprisingly) as the strawberry pie. The filling is pretty tame on the sugar, so you actually get a fairly distinct apple flavor rather than overly sweet cinnamon. The vanilla cake is much like its darker cousin. Rich, moist, and pretty subtle on flavor - it's really just there to act as a container for the pie. Nothing more, nothing less. When you slap the two halves together with freshly whipped vanilla buttercream, you get a fairly distinct dessert. Is it delicious? For sure. It's 1800 calories I definitely don't regret eating. Is it worth the price tag of $9? No... but keep in mind I'm a tight-fisted cheap-ass who hates spending more than $5 for lunch.