Pumpkin Bread...Cake?

Our Thanksgiving get together we also celebrated my nieces second Birthday.  My sister asked me to make some chocolate mousse. I showed her a recipe I had found on Pinterest which looked so simple and easy...only chocolate and water, what could go wrong???

It turns out if I don't refresh my memory by going over the recipe before I attempt it I might, just possibly, screw it up.

So I melted the chocolate the way you're supposed to do it.  One pan over another one with hot water. And then I whipped the chocolate like it was a bad, bad boy!  It did nothing.  So I thought...maybe if I add some fluffy whipped cream???
So I pulled out a huge carton of Heavy Whipping Cream and began to beat that, too.  Eventually I had my nice fluffy whipped cream and I folded it into the chocolate hoping to see a consistency change. 

Ehh..nope.  Maybe the processed version of whipped cream will stand up to the chocolate better??

Nope.

So I whip and whip and whip some more!  Nothing! It has a thick frosting like consistency.  It is now 11pm the day before our Thanksgiving.  This is not happening, how can I save the Birthday dessert at this point??

I didn't have any cake mixes on hand, nor all the ingredients to pull one together from scratch. 

At this point my brain was working over time, how could I ruin my nieces Birthday dessert?  This is unacceptable!!  SOMETHING MUST BE DONE!!

I find my Pillsbury boxed Pumpkin bread mix in the pantry and think, this might just work!!
Now, this boxed bread calls for water, oil and eggs but I remembered reading somewhere on Pinterest (yup, thank goodness for Pinterest!) that you can take canned Pumpkin puree and add it to any cake mixture and skip the water, oil and eggs.  I thought, well I've already screwed this up this far and the chances of them actually liking a Pumpkin bread cake are slim - I am going all out with my experiment!

I dumped the bread mix into a mixing bowl and then added the pumpkin puree and mixed it all together so that every bit of bread mix was nice and moist.

I then spread the bread mixture into a shallow, small loaf/cake pan.  I poured a small amount of the chocolate over the first layer, but only on one side in case it didn't turn out.  Yes, on this I was being cautious, go figure!  Added the top layer and baked it according to the package directions, which was something like bake at 350 for 18-20 mins.

I pulled it out after about 18 minutes and let it cool while I...watched TV probably.   After it seemed cool enough to transfer I plopped it onto a cake platter.  It was too soft in the middle to flip back rightside, so I left it bottom side up.  It would be frosted anyway so it didn't really matter.

I poured the chocolate mixture from the failed mousse attempt onto the bread "cake".  It set overnight and then was served up as my nieces Happy Birthday cake, which she ate 1 1/2 pieces of!! Yay!!

It turned out pretty thick and the chocolate was thick too once it cooled on the bread but it really was a great combination, especially the part with the chocolate layer in the bread!