PUMPKIN PATCH CAKE

Recipe from the Washington Post. 

For this operation you need a traditional-shaped Bundt pan (or two), two boxes of cake mix, enough white frosting to cover 2
cakes, orange and green food coloring, a cupcake tin, and some extra devil's food cake crumbs or chocolate jimmies. (If you know
how much scratch cake to make to fill two Bundt pans, go ahead and make it from scratch.) What you do is make up the two boxes
of cake mix as usual and bake them in the Bundt pan(s), except for one lonely little cupcake baked in the cupcake tin. Cake flavor
doesn't matter, though if you use chocolate you will be able to use the crumbs later on, as you will see. 

Unmold the Bundt cakes and place them bottom-to-bottom. If you use the original Bundt pan, the ridges on the cakes will make
the cakes resemble a pumpkin at this point. Set the cakes on a large platter (one cake will be on top of the other, upside-down) and
frost them with the white frosting tinted orange. There will probably be a big hole down the middle of the cake. Fill that with leftover
frosting and set the green cupcake on top. The cupcake will be the pumpkin stem. Unwrap that and put it in the hole in the cakes
and frost that with the white frosting tinted green. You can use leftover chocolate crumbs or chocolate jimmies to sprinkle around
the cake on the platter to resemble soil. You could use crushed Famous Chocolate Wafers or even Oreo cookies to make "soil." For
the finishing touch, carve a jack o'lantern face out of the pumpkin cake! 

QUOTE NOTE: "I tried the pumpkin patch cake last year and got rave reviews! The only thing different is that I used a regular ice
cream cone for the stem of the pumpkin (covered with frosting) and I colored cocount an orange-brown color and scattered it
around the bottom of the cake. Also, I used candy corn and licorice to make the face. Remember that you can do the same cake for
Thanksgiving, just leave off the face!"