Molasses Pumpkin Pie

I’m still working through my holiday baking posts. I made molasses pumpkin pie and swirled a little extra molasses in to make the decoration.

French Pumpkin Soup

This creamy soup can easily be made vegan. I simply substituted oat cream for the half and half, replaced the chicken broth with vegetable broth, and left out the butter and cheese toast.

Baked Apples with Pumpkin Caramel

I still have a lot of apples left, so I decided to make baked apples with pumpkin caramel. In place of rye sourdough I simply used a rye-wheat that I often have on hand. I also made it vegan by using coconut oil in place of butter, replacing the double cream with oat cream, and skipping the sour cream.

Pumpkin and “Cheese” Pasta

Here is the recipe for this vegan pumpkin mac and “cheese”. I left out the sage. Although I like it, it’s a taste I associate with a classic pumpkin or squash pasta, and I wanted something different. I fried the onion and garlic in a pan instead of baking it, and added it to the sauce. I used a bit of oat cream instead of non-dairy milk, and added a few cashew nuts to the sauce. I used a rye-wheat bread for the breadcrumbs.

Italian Pumpkin Cabbage Soup

I had cabbage left over from rumbledethumps, and pumpkin left over from olan, so I looked for a recipe which would use both, and found one. Naturally I replaced the lard in the original recipe with vegetable oil to make it vegan.

Olan

According to this recipe, the dish can be made with ash gourd or with yellow pumpkin. I used Hokkaido pumpkin, which is widely available where I live. It is a simple dish, consisting of cowpeas and pumpkin in coconut milk.

Pumpkin-Ginger Soup

I used a friend’s recipe for this. It is boiled pumpkin with ginger and salt. I also added lemon juice and sage. It is topped with roasted almonds. The ginger has a nice bite, but I prefer pumpkin soup with carrot.

Playing with my Food: Bread with Circles

This is another milk (part rye) loaf, topped with oatmeal flakes. I used pumpkin to keep it moist. Inside, I created a pattern of circles using Dutch-process cocoa powder and matcha powder.

I was inspired after looking at pictures of giraffe-, leopard- and watermelon-pattern bread.

Baking More Bread: Milk-Pumpkin-Chia-Hemp-Rye Loaf

I’ve been making a lot of bread lately because I realized I miss having toast in the mornings. This loaf has pumpkin, chia seeds, rye flour, and hemp flour and is topped with sunflower seeds. Incorporating a bit of fruit or vegetable mash seems to be my key to getting such nice breads reliably.

Oatmeal Pumpkin Chia Bread

This is another milk bread, which is my bread of choice because it stays soft and fresh for days, which is helpful when you know the bread won’t be completely eaten the day it is made. I added oat flakes to the scalded milk and melted butter and then added the yeast when it cooled. I combined this with a mix of wheat and rye flour, salt, lemon juice, chia seeds and pumpkin purée. After the first rise,when the bread was shaped, I brushed it with milk, sprinkled oat flakes on top, and cut it.

The pumpkin was not part of my original plan for this loaf, but after baking a pumpkin earlier in the week and preparing pumpkin pancakes (twice), pumpkin hemp bread and pumpkin cake, I still had some purée left which need to be used. I like the golden colour it gives the loaf and the flavour in the pumpkin hemp loaf was unobtrusive, so I figured I’d make use of the pumpkin before it went bad. Next time I should buy a smaller pumpkin, or prepare for pumpkin to again invade most of what I cook for a week!

I should probably also consider replacing my silicon bread pan with a firmer pan as the bread tends to bulge a lot at the sides (the overly-deep cut didn’t help, either).