Pumpkin Pie Spice, homemade

Lots of American recipes I see now use Pumpkin Pie Spice in them.  I have checked closely, but nowhere sells it.  So then I checked my trusty friend, Google, and hey presto!  I found a recipe (or twenty!). 

I signed up a while ago to the Betty Crocker website, as they do so many different items and hav so many recipes from which to choose.  So when I saw that Betty had a recipe for spice mix, well, that just had to be the one I chose. 

As you can see on my photo, I didn't use quite all the right amounts.  And to be perfectly honest, I found it too heavy on the cloves even with these proportions.  So I added in another 2 teaspoons of ground cinnamon, to take off a bit of the clove taste, and it works better for me.

If you make some, do let me know what you think - and how much you enjoy baking with it.  Mmm, smells like Autumn!!

Pumpkin spice chocolate brownies

Thanks to the delicious chocolate chip pumpkin loaves I'd made a few days ago, I had more pumpkin puree to use.  I had looked out recipes for Pumpkin Snickerdoodle cookies, and Pumpkin cheesecakes, and Pumpkin chocolate chip cookies and so on and so forth.  But these American recipes seem to make huge quantities, like 4 dozen cookies, or 9" large cakes, and we just can't eat that much food quickly enough that it's fresh.  And as crazy as it sounds, we don't always have taste-testers handy to help us eat up all the delicious baking and cooking we do.  (if at this point you'd like to volunteer your services, leave a comment below, thanks)

So, I figured chocolate brownies with the delicious addition of pumpkin plus the relevant spice mix would work.

I used my go-to brownie recipe - you could use yours, or a packet mix, whatever you like really.  I layered in half the mixture, swirled some pumpkin across this part, then poured on the rest of the brownie batter and dolloped and swirled the remainder of the pumpkin puree on top.  I had recently found and bought Halloween coloured peanut M&M's, so sprinkled them on top.

I added the pumpkin pie spice mix to the brownie batter before I poured it in, so that it would fully mix.  I kept tasting it to check, and added 4 tsp of spice before I felt I could taste it.  This baked up quite strong-tasting, and on my first bite I must have bitten into a little puddle of ginger, so I got a little fright that they were too strongly spiced, eek!

I gave some to a friend to test, as she hadn't had pumpkin much before, and her family's verdict was that they were great - just the right amount of everything.  Team Becca liked them too, especially the edges as they were a bit less squidgy than the very middle.  I think it was more moist than usual because of the pumpkin - yummy!

Chocolate chip pumpkin cake

I follow quite a few American baking blogs and Facebook pages, and at this time of year they all talk about the most wonderful sounding Autumn flavours of pumpkin, caramel, cinnamon, apple and the like.  So much so that I even made a Pinterest board just for Autumn flavours, mmm...  Feel free to follow that board, any board of mine, or even every board of mine - it'll be fun to have you along.

So anyway, one of these recipes I noticed was for a chocolate chip pumpkin cake (I don't have the link handy, but will add it in when I remember where I found it) that sounded easy and tasty.  Ok, found it! and it turns out it is actually for Easy Pumpkin bars, I must have tweaked it a little...

Although, looking at the photo I seem to recall that this may not have been quite the right recipe, because I remember halving it as I only wanted two, not four, loaves.  So I think the one I used must have been called a pumpkin loaf, or pumpkin bread.  Ah well, it will have been similar.

As you can see, the loaves are very low, so I could have just made one larger/taller one with all the batter I had... I probably made a note on the recipe to remind me of that for next time.  Because yes, dear readers, there will be a next time.  This was delicious, like an afternoon tea type of cake that suits the British palate quite well.  I have found in the past that pumpkin items tend to be incredibly moist, and not our favourite texture (like a pumpkin pie perhaps).  But this was eaten by the whole team, and all taste-testers were pleased with the texture.  Well, all the British locals were - one good friend, American, felt it wasn't quite moist enough for her!  ha ha.

You can't please all of the people all of the time, I guess...

Dundee loves Clandestine Cake Club, Autumn style

It was time for another meeting of our branch of The Clandestine Cake Club and this time the theme was Fall Fancies, the colours and flavours of Autumn.

I really fancied making a pumpkin cake, especially after doing the pumpkin cupcakes a week ago.  I had specially bagged up the pumpkin puree in 200g and 440g (approx 1.5 cups) bags in preparation.  One of my American cake friends, C,  set up a board on Pinterest called Cakes to bake-Pumpkin and directed me to the Brown Butter Pumpkin Layer Cake.  She had tried one or two of the recipes, and this one looked like something I could manage.

After converting all the measurements to metric, I got started.  Once again, the pumpkin seemed to make the cake very moist and dense, even though I baked it for longer than the specified time and the inserted skewer came out clean.  And it felt kind of wrong to burn butter on purpose, but I had to do it 3 times for the brown butter components of each section.  Mmm, what a difference it made to the taste though.  Spiced pumpkin sponge, cream cheese icing and caramelised pecan nuts - yummy.

That beauty is my contribution.  Below are the cakes brought by all the bakers - from L to R we have Jackie's Cinnamon Apple cake, Jac's version of a Halloween Victoria Sponge - complete with choc fondant eyeballs, Ellen's Apple and Bramble bundt cake, Catriona's Pumpkin Maple bundt, my cake, Gary's Beetroot Choc cake and Carolyn's Sticky Pear and Ginger Cake.  Sadly Kelly was unwell though, so we missed her cake.

To each event a baker is invited to bring a guest, called an eater, to help taste and eat the cakes.  So in this case we had a couple more eaters than bakers - because there is always So Much Cake.  You really do need the help, I promise.

And here is the lovely little cafe chosen for this event, on the Perth Road if you are local to Dundee...  Although I think next time we'll need to chose a larger venue - this event had a long waiting list, so exciting!!

Just a query - for those of you who bake with pumpkin regularly, does this slice of cake look good to you?  No, honestly I'm not fishing for compliments (though they will always be gratefully and graciously accepted) but it seems dense to me and my Mr...

 

It's Autumn, it's time for pumpkin

A regular customer, and friend, C decided she'd like to bring a gift to her parents and asked for a tray of brownies and 'something else'.  Ooh, what do you add to a tray of brownies?  Having been reading all those blogs and posts about apples, cinnamon and pumpkin, I had bought a small pumpkin and cooked and mashed and bagged the pulp.  It wasn't very orange, or strongly flavoured, so I did the same and added some butternut squash to it before popping in the freezer. 

However, before bagging and freezing all of it the inspired idea of pumpkin cupcakes came to me, and thus to C and her parents.  I had made them last year, and was excited to do so again.  They baked up quite moist and dense, and tasted just great with the cream cheese icing sprinkled with cinnamon and all-spice.  Mmmm, afternoon tea is served...

 

Mini pumpkin pies, better late than never

Before I got around to the actual baking and cooking, I had had great plans for things to bring to Thanksgiving dinner.  These mini pumpkin pies were one of the items I planned to make, but after reading (incorrectly, as it turned out) through the recipe, I felt that the dozen it would supply wouldn't be enough so didn't do them.

I had the time a few days later, and started by cooking the pumpkin and so forth.  I rolled out my sheet of room-temperature shortcrust pastry (you didn't think I was going to attempt making my own pastry, did you?  Thanks for the vote of confidence, but not yet) and stamped out as many circles as I could.  After filling them with mix, I couldn't figure out why they were so full and I still had loads of mix left?!

So I read and re-read the recipe, and then discovered that I had bought a 375g packet of pastry, and the recipe required 500g.  Aha, problem solved.  But what to do with the extra mix?  Nah, we couldn't figure that one out either... The pies baked up really well, and tasted very American.  Which is to say, sweet and gently spiced and not at all like we expected - good but different.  So I won't be making these for us again in a hurry, ha ha.

Pumpkin, in a cupcake?

You may have gathered by now that I'm not a born-and-bred Scot, but rather an honourary one by virtue of the amount of time we've lived here.  And in the land of milk and honey where I was raised (but interestingly, not born) I don't recall us ever eating pumpkin.  Certainly Halloween and Thanksgiving weren't celebrated.  Suffice it to say, I love butternut squash and so did the girls when younger.  I bought a lovely-looking one and then toyed with the idea of serving it to them with pasta, creme fraiche and herbs for dinner.  Or in cupcakes for afternoon tea.  Guess what won?

I found just the recipe I wanted in the first Hummingbird book, read it over, and got to work.  These were pretty much like vanilla cupcakes but with mashed pumpkin and cinnamon added, and buttercream icing.  As such they were really  moist (note to self, make them taller next time) and lasted well.  Or they would have, if they didn't get eaten so quickly.