Pumpkin Bakery

A pumpkin goes a long way... and I've still got several in storage.
Hopefully they'll last a while, but every now and then one needs using up.

I don't understand why, but when harvesting they need a good piece of stalk left on. The other day I accidentally knocked the top off a butternut and, within a couple of days, it began to go.

Pumpkin soup is scrummy, warm and delicious. I usually go for a spiced up recipe. Despite each pumpkin leading to gallons of soup, it still seems to disappear quite quickly. But pumpkin has a strange sweetness to it too. This is most exploited in America in the form of pumpkin pie - something I've not yet tried cooking. The condensed milk always sounds just a bit too sickly!

Pumpkin makes a good bread too, (try this recipe for orangey pumpkin bread - it actually uses a whole orange blitzed up and tastes gorgeous - though mine came out more like a cake than a moist bread) but here I want to tell you about pumpkin cake. I actually made it about ten days ago and it's all gone now, but I've completely forgotten where the recipe came from - which is absolutely no use to you! However, recipes are widely available and they are much of a muchness. All I can say is to give one of them a go. I did and I wasn't disappointed.

Dry ingredients at the ready.

This cake mix did well to make it through to the baking stage!
I certainly enjoyed licking the bowl.

Voila!

A couple of hints
1. This recipe called for pumpkin puree (canned) but I just cooked up some pumpkin and ran it through the food processor. Inexplicably, though, I got less weight of puree out than the pumpkin that I put in. Had I not run out of pumpkin because of this, a pumpkin pie may actually have materialised too.
2. Read the reviews after the recipes - I searched for a frosted icing recipe and the one I settled on came out way too runny and was almost unsaveable. The first review told me this, had I looked at it!