Pumpkin, Chocolate and Maple Loaf

I say this every year, but I'm still going to repeat myself - I love the flavours of Autumn and the heavier, more comforting style of  baking more than any other time of year. Fresh autumn produce is still in abundance, and can be used to great effect with spices, citrus fruit and chocolate for a while longer, until winter brings reliance on stored and preserved fruit and nuts.

The use of fresh autumn produce was the thought behind the choice of pumpkin for this month's We Should Cocoa challenge, and I could have bought a pumpkin and made my own pumpkin purée, but for baking I find the tins of purée much more reliable. For those less averse to risk, Hungryhinny, this month's We Should Cocoa host, explains how to make pumpkin purée and pumpkin pie spice mix, in this post.

Last year, I remember trying to find a recipe using both pumpkin and maple syrup, which is another of my favourite autumn flavours, and not being successful, but I had more luck this year and, after adding chocolate into the search, eventually settled on this recipe for a non-yeast bread containing all three. After seeing the outcome, I decided to drop the word 'bread' from the title as the loaf was nothing like bread in texture.

I followed the batter recipe closely but substituted 2 teaspoons of cinnamon for the pumkin pie spice, as I've come to realise that it is only that particular combination of spices which makes me dislike pumpkin pie so much! I may have added more chocolate too, as I used a 100g bar of plain 74% chocolate, and I think half a cup of chocolate chips would be around 80g - but you can't have too much chocolate really, can you?

When it came to icing the loaf, I made a maple glacé icing, with icing sugar, two teaspoons of lemon juice, two tablepoons of maple syrup and water to mix to a thick pouring consistency. After drizzling the cake with this I sprinkled over some maple sugar crystals - a foodie souvenir of our Canadian holiday a few years ago. I took a photo quickly at this stage, in case the crystals dissolved into the icing, but fortunately they didn't, so the photographs after cutting the cake still show the topping. Phew!

The flavour of this cake was terrific, but the texture wasn't the best. It was slightly too moist - the photos of the cut cake show a dense layer at the bottom which doesn't look properly baked, even though a tester came out clean at the end of the baking time. Fortunately this moistness didn't make the cake too dense and chewy - it was lighter than it looks! I think this might have been better baked as muffins, as suggested in the recipe, or even as a more shallow traybake cut into fingers. I'm not sure that the oats added anything to the flavour or the texture - they stayed as small chewy pieces in the crumb. I wonder if the recipe originally had nuts in it, and someone substituted the oats - I certainly think chopped pecans or walnuts would have been nicer.

We Should Cocoa is a monthly baking challenge set up by Choclette at Chocolate Log Blog and Chele at Chocolate Teapot. The idea is to make a chocolate product containing that month's chosen ingredient or cooking method. This month, the guest host, hungryhinny, has chosen 'pumpkin', and will be publishing a round up of entries at the end of the month.

Pumpkin-Apple Streusel Cake

This recipe for Pumpkin-Apple Streusel Cake, from Epicurious, was chosen to use up the rest of the can of pumpkin purée, which I'd opened to make the spiced chocolate orange cake from my previous post. I'm afraid to say this cake wasn't nearly as successful. The pumpkin cake layer was very moist and dense and the homemade pumpkin pie spice was rather overwhelming - in fact CT and Hubs didn't really like it at all! The photo looks worse than the cake actually was - cutting into the dense sponge seemed to compress it, so that the texture was lost, but within the slices the sponge texture was still there!

I followed the recipe almost exactly! I substituted 100mls oil and a tablespoon of water for the butter in the cake batter and used four cups of several varieties of homegrown apples which I had in the kitchen. I've no idea what variety the apple from my mother was, but the apples I grew were Blenheim Beauty and Falstaff. I made the pumpkin pie spice from this recipe.

I like the concept of this cake - the layer of buttery, cinnamon spiced apples on top of a cake, with a crisp streusel topping - but this time the cake wasn't quite right. I could see the idea working well on a ginger cake, but you'd need to be sure that the apples wouldn't sink.

Today, I had to make a batch of our favourite 'healthy' brownies, for CT, who won't eat any more of this particular cake!

Spiced Chocolate and Orange Pumpkin Cake

Since my last post, I've had a disastrous attempt at a honey and spice cake, which ended up with the cake in the dustbin and me buying (!!) cake from the supermarket. It was a Lemon and Ginger cake - I stuck to the October 'spice' theme - and a very nice cake, but expensive for it's size. Not a very good start to National Baking Week! Anyway, while I was idly scanning the cookery ingredients shelf in the supermarket, I spotted the seasonal appearance of tins of pumpkin purée. No-one here likes pumpkin pie, but I have made pumpkin swirl brownies in the past, which were very successful. So into the basket went a tin of pumpkin - and home I went, to look for a recipe combining pumpkin and spices, and using oil instead of butter.

I also decided it was time to open the second tin of maple syrup I brought back from Canada last year, but then couldn't find a recipe that I like the look of. The nicest looking recipe used maple flavouring, which I've never seen on sale - maple syrup just wouldn't give enough flavour in such small quantities. Time to ditch the maple syrup idea, and proceed on the well known baking fact that there's nothing that can't be improved by adding chocolate! So I kept the basic recipe for Pumpkin-Maple Coffee Cake, but left out the maple flavour; I added the zest of an orange to the cake batter and 75g very finely chopped 85% chocolate to the central layer of sugar and cinnamon. I also used natural yogurt instead of buttermilk, because I didn't want to wait until I could shop again, and yogurt is always in the fridge

The result was an excellent cake, although the pumpkin was well-disguised by the other flavours. Hubs was really impressed by the way the cinnamon, chocolate and orange blended harmoniously together in a very light cake. My one criticism is one that I often have with American 'traybake' recipes - the tin size stipulated was too big for the amount of batter. After spreading the thinnest layer of batter possible on the base of the tin, there wasn't enough left to completely cover the layer of chocolate. This meant that although the layers looked neat on the central pieces of cake (top photo), on the edges the layers petered out rather untidily(lower photo)! Note to self - next time bake in a 8" square tin, cook for a few minutes longer and get a deeper cake!

Now I have to look for a recipe using no more than 275g pumpkin purée, to use up what was left from the tin I opened.

Hallowe'en Brownies

I think I enjoy seasonal baking at this time of year more than any other; I love the bold gutsy flavours of autumn fruits and nuts much more than the delicate flavours of summer berries. The autumn harvest takes the added flavours of spices well, which I also like to use, and fits into my (usually)rustic style of baking much better.

Having said that, I don't usually use pumpkin in my baking, after trying and hating pumpkin pie a few years ago. When my children were younger we didn't get caught up with the growing celebration of Hallowe'en, either, regarding it as a 'foreign' import which might go away if we ignored it. So I was somewhat surprised to find a tin of pumpkin purée in my store cupboard, although the half-price 'reduced to clear' label may have had something to do with why I bought it. Anyone who knows me knows that I can't resist a food bargain!

I'm not the only person to have tried Martha Stewart's recipe for Pumpkin-Swirl Brownies recently; I've seen it on several (or maybe even many) other blogs in the last few days, starting with this one on 'Cake or Death?'. That isn't a reason in itself to try the recipe - my reasoning was that combining the pumpkin with chocolate was possibly the only way I'd be able to sneak it past other members of the family! I found recipes which mixed pumpkin purée into chocolate cake batter, but disguising it that completely seemed to defeat the object of using pumpkin in the first place. The effect created by layering a pumpkin flavoured batter with a chocolate batter and swirling them together seemed ideal; a fabulous visual effect, and possibly a better chance of discerning the separate flavours.

The recipe was straightforward to follow, although I did convert the American cup volumes and ounce weights into metric weights and measures - for some reason I just don't feel confident using cups after years of relying on scales. Despite warnings about working quickly because the batters, particularly the chocolate one, 'set' quickly, I didn't find this to be a problem. The alternate layers of batter were quite thin and I found it difficult to spread them on top of each other without disturbing the layer beneath, but it wasn't a major problem - it just upset my desire for perfection not to be able to spread the second and subsequent layers to the edges of the tin - but I soon realised this could help rather than hinder the final visual effect.

Here's the 'translation' of the recipe to metric weights, rounded to the nearest 5g, to suit my scales:

115g butter
170g plain chocolate (72% cocoa solids)
240g plain flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon cayenne powder
400g caster sugar
4 large eggs
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
275g tinned pumpkin purée
80mls sunflower oil
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
75g chopped nuts (I used pecans)

Follow the recipe as in the link - you may find these tips useful:

Mix the oil into the pumkin in a small bowl, and add the cinnamon and nutmeg. You're less likely to forget anything if it's all in one bowl, ready to go.

When it came to dividing the base batter in half I used my scales and found that half the batter was 400g. Next time I can just take out 400g into a second bowl, making one less bowl to wash up.

I found judging the point that the cake was cooked quite a problem. although it felt firm it still didn't test as done when it had been in the oven for 50 minutes, and I was mindful that as a brownie it shouldn't be overcooked. I decided to ignore my testing probe and take the cake out of the oven.

When cooled and cut, my judgement was that the pumpkin part was slightly undercooked and the chocolate maybe slightly overcooked for a brownie. There were as many adverse comments as good ones, about this bake, on the website and perhaps that's the fundamental problem with the cake - the two layers won't cook in the same time. If you cook until the pumpkin layers are done then it is no longer the texture of a brownie, as the chocolate layers will be well overcooked.

The undercooked pumkin didn't detract from the final result, as it kept the texture chewy and moist - as you would want a brownie. Overall the flavour and texture was very well balanced - the pumpkin was noticeable, but not dominant; the spicing was very subtle with the cayenne only just detectable as an added warmth, gentle but not intrusive and the texture was right for a brownie.


If I ever come across cheap tins of pumpkin again, this would be on the list to make again, although in my quest for a recipe I found several that I would like to try, including this lovely looking bundt cake from Hilary at 'Let Her Bake Cake'.