Pumpkin "Dump" Cake - FAIL

We usually spend Thanksgiving at my brothers' house with about 20 other folks. Well this year they are out of town so we are kind of on our own. I'm totally OK with that. I'm making a chicken instead of a turkey. My son requested pumpkin pecan pie. I have a tried and true recipe and it always turns out great. I asked him if I could make something different this year. I wanted to try the pumpkin dump cake recipe floating around Pinterest. I made a dump cake back here that turned out really well. I wanted to actually make something from Pinterest instead of just always pinning stuff. It was easy and based on my prior results I thought it would taste pretty good. BTW - I'm not a fan of "baking" with convenience foods like a cake mix. But how could so many glowing reviews be so wrong?

I followed this recipe. Blah. I don't recommend it. I added more than double the amount of spices in the recipe (we really like cinnamon and ginger). The cake was overly salty and pretty bland. The bland surprised me. There was not enough butter on top. So after cooking for 50 minutes I had an inch of powdered cake mix on top of my pumpkin and it was still soupy underneath. I sliced up more butter and put it all around the top. I baked it again for another 10 minutes. After 10 minutes it looked like it needed more time. I baked it another 10 minutes. Then an additional 10 minutes. Then still an additional 10 minutes. Finally it wasn't jiggly any more and the additional butter seemed to have soaked in. All you can taste is salty and sweet with a buttery feel in your mouth. The pumpkin is hardly present. What a huge disappointment.

It gets tons of good reviews on multiple recipe sites. I followed the recipe exactly up to the point that it was "done cooking" but under done and consisted of a box of dry cake mix on top of a soupy mixture. Then I checked out other recipes and see that some use a much smaller can of pumpkin and 1/2 cup more butter than the recipe that I followed. I would also use less sugar and totally skip the salt. I would also recommend slicing the butter and putting it on top instead of melting and drizzling. Drizzling left many spots with no butter = dry cake mix.  If I just sliced first I wouldn't have had to add more butter at the end. Frankly I'm not entirely sure that I won't chuck the entire thing into the garbage (and I have a huge sweet tooth and will eat just about anything). FAIL. FAIL. (It's a two fail kind of recipe).