Chocolate Pumpkin Cake

We still had several pieces of the roasted pumpkin left in the fridge today, so I made it into a chocolate pumpkin cake with chocolate glazing. The taste of the cake is predominantly chocolate, the pumpkin is there for moisture and texture. If Alex was not so averse to nuts and raisins, I would have added some to the cake too, I love my cakes full of stuff :)

Ingredients 

• 320 g roasted pumpkin
• 2 eggs
• 200 g sugar
• 80 g sunflower oil
• 220 g flour
• 20 g cocoa powder
• 10 g baking powder
  

Beat the eggs with the sugar and the oil. Add the roasted pumpkin and mix. Gradually add the flour, mixed with the cocoa powder and the baking powder.  The resulting batter is fairly viscous and sticky. Pour it in a  baking form and bake in a preheated oven at 180C until a toothpick, stuck in the center of the cake, comes out dry.

Alternatively you can pour the batter into muffin forms and bake the cake into muffins - this mixture should produce about 20 average size muffins.

Let the cake completely cool and then make the chocolate glazing. I melted 50 g of milk chocolate over boiling water, added 20 g milk and 10 g butter and generously poured the melted glaze over the cake.

Serve with coffee or tea and enjoy!

Pumpkin Pancakes

This autumn we are into pumpkins. Twice we happened upon extremely delicious sweet ones and we've been trying to repeat the score, without success. Our latest baked pumpkins all happened to be somewhat bland and not very sweet. But there's always pumpkin puree and its addition to various other desserts, like pancakes.

I have a fool-proof pancake recipe, that I can make with my eyes closed - to every egg add one cup of milk and 2/3 cups of flour, some salt, sugar and a sprinkle of oil and bake. I make these at least twice per month, but once in a while I get a craving for something more exotic. I've tried with adding grated apples and last night I made them with pumpkin puree.

• two eggs
• 150 g pumpkin puree
• 120 g milk
• 100 g flour
• 20 g sugar, 5 g salt 
• 15 g oil
  

Bake in a pancake pan and serve with honey, jam or fruit. Perfect autumn dessert!

Pumpkin Dinner Rolls

It's pumpkin season and I'm trying out new pumpkin recipes. Yesterday I steamed half a butternut squash, pureed it with sugar, whipped 200 g cream and mixed the pumpkin with the cream for a fluffy sweet dessert.This morning there were still two cups of the pumpkin cream in the fridge, so when youtube offered me this pumpkin dinner rolls video (how did they know the contents of my fridge !!!!) I thought - this is serendipity, I have to try these rolls.

Because I used my pumpkin cream mixture, my ingredients are a bit different from those in the video:

Ingredients:

• 200g pumpkin puree
• 60 g cream
• 100 g sugar
• 35 g olive oil
• 350 g flour
• 3 g salt
• 7 g instant dry yeast
• 30 g milk
• 1 egg

I turned on the oven at 40C, poured the cold pumpkin cream mixture in the metal bowl of the mixer and put it in the oven to bring it to room temperature. Meanwhile I added the yeast to 30 g warm milk with 1 tbsp of sugar. When the puree was warm enough I added all of the listed ingredients to the bowl (only half the beaten egg) and turned the mixer on for 10 min. After the dough was done mixing I covered the bowl with cling foil and put it in the warm oven (40C) for 45 min.

After the dough had doubled it's size I kneaded it lightly, divided it into 16 balls and cut them with oily scissors as shown in the video. Then I left the mini pumpkins to proof again in the warm oven for 20  min.

After the second proofing I turned the oven to warm to 180C and meanwhile I glazed the pumpkins with the second half of the beaten egg and a tbsp of oil. Then I baked the pumpkins until golden. The texture of the rolls is very fluffy and delicate, the taste is yummy with just a hint of sweetness, this recipe is a keeper. Next time I want to try the original recipe and the second method for preparing the pumpkins, using cheese filling and string ties.

Pumpkin Muffins

It's pumpkin season again and it smells divinely of cinnamon, vanilla and nutmeg in our kitchen. Today I made pumpkin muffins, pumpkin with milk rice, roasted pumpkin and pumpkin spice latte - all from the small butternut squash. The golden nugget will be carved for our Halloween lantern on Monday.

This is the second time I made the muffins and there'll be more of these soon, so the recipe is a keeper:

Ingredients for 12 muffins:

• 1 large egg
• 1/2 cup sugar
• 1/3 cup oil (I use olive oil or sunflower oil)
• 1 cup flour
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 1/2 cup cranberries / raisins
• 1 tbsp rum / whiskey
• 1 cup grated raw pumpkin
• spices - vanilla, cinnamon, nutmeg

Preparation: Soak the cranberries in the rum. Beat the egg with the sugar, add the oil, sift the flour with the baking powder and add it to the batter. Add the cranberries and the grated pumpkin, spice the batter and distribute it into the muffin cups. Bake the muffins at 180C in a preheated oven until ready.

The taste is rich of pumpkin - a bit like pumpkin pie, sweet and spicy. I forgot to add the cinnamon to the batter and sprinkled it on top, but it's better to put it in together with the other ingredients.