Use up all the parts of your pumpkin with this yummy spiced pumpkin “gut” cake!
Autumn is here, which calls for plenty of yummy cooking and baking using apples, blackberries, ginger and plenty of cinnamon! One ingredient that is used a lot in American autumn (or fall) baking is pumpkin. I have never baked with pumpkin before and was very keen to give it a go!
This recipe was recently featured in a post about 7 Thanksgiving Recipes for a Holiday Feast by Meals and Mile Markers! Go check out some of the other fantastic recipes!
What does Pumpkin Cake taste like?
So, for those of you who haven´t baked with pumpkin before either, here is how I would describe the taste:
Firstly, and perhaps most importantly, it doesn´t taste like pumpkin. Instead, it helps to make the cake really nice and moist. Adding all the ground spices reminded me of Christmas! It really reminded me of gingerbread biscuits or ginger cakes! So, perhaps American pumpkin cake is just their interpretation of British ginger cake.
How can you use Pumpkin in Baking?
When browsing the web and Pinterest for pumpkin baking recipes, I came across all kinds of bakes! Pumpkin pies, pumpkin cookies, pumpkin cupcakes, pumpkin cheesecake, pumpkin traybakes – you name it! I literally found pumpkin-everything!
In the end, I decided to give this Pumpkin Cake from Sally´s Baking Addiction a try.
Making your own pumpkin purée – and using up all the parts of the pumpkin!
Most recipes I saw called for the use of tinned pumpkin purée. Unfortunately, you cannot buy pumpkin purée in the UK, so I had to make my own.
To do this, I roasted the flesh and then mashed and then puréed it.
However, after carving the pumpkin and removing the insides, I was left with all the stringy guts of the pumpkin. I didn´t quite know what to do with them and it seemed like such a waste to throw them into the bin!
So, it was cake invention time!
To avoid throwing the stringy insides of the pumpkin away, I decided to use them to make a spiced pumpkin “gut” cake. To do so, I roughly based the quantities of the dry ingredients on my Swedish banana loaf cake.
The dry ingredients combined wholemeal and plain flour and brown sugar. To make the cake taste more autumnal, I also added some of my favourite autumn/winter spices to the mix: ground allspice, ground cloves, and ground ginger.
The wet ingredients included vegetable oil, eggs and of course the pumpkin “guts”.
I also added a few pecan nuts to the mix and sprinkled them over the top of the cake for a bit of extra crunch.
Combine the ingredients to make a batter, put it into a loaf tin, bake it and bob´s your uncle! A deliciously tasting (and smelling!) pumpkin gut loaf cake!
Optionally, you can drizzle some cream cheese frosting over the cooled loaf.
I took this pumpkin gut cake invention along to my University´s Baking Society Meeting and it went down a treat! So, next time, instead of throwing the “guts” of your pumpkin, try making this spiced pumpkin “gut” loaf cake instead!!!
Spiced Pumpkin “Gut” Cake
Recipe
Ingredients:
FOR THE CAKE:
- 150g whole wheat flour
- 150g plain flour
- 200g light brown sugar
- ½ tsp bicarbonate of soda
- 1 tsp baking powder
- 1 tsp ground cinnamon
- ½ tsp allspice
- ½ tsp ground cloves
- ½ tsp ground ginger
- Pinch of salt
- 40g pecan nut, roughly chopped
- 200g pumpkin guts, chopped
- 120ml vegetable oil
- 2 large eggs
FOR THE CREAM CHEESE DRIZZLE:
- 50g soft cream cheese (full fat or low fat will work)
- 2 tbsp icing sugar
- Squeeze of lemon juice
Methods:
- Preheat the oven to 180°C. Lightly grease a 1.5 litre loaf tin and line with a thin strip of baking paper, so that it hangs over the narrow sides of the tin. This will make it easy to lift the cake out of the tin later.
- Place all the dry ingredients into a large baking bowl, but reserve some of the chopped pecan nuts to sprinkle over the top of the cake. Mix with a wooden spoon until everything is well combined.
- In another bowl, whisk together the pumpkin gut, vegetable oil, and eggs. Pour into the dry ingredients and beat with a wooden spoon to form a thick batter.
- Pour the cake batter into your prepared loaf tin and level the surface with a spatula or back of a spoon. Sprinkle the cake with the reserved pecan nuts.
- Bake in the preheated oven for about 50-60 minutes until it starts shrinking away from the edges and an inserted skewer comes out clean.
- Leave the cake to cool in its tin for about 10 minutes, before gently lifting it out of the tin and placing it onto a wire rack. Leave to cool completely.
- Before serving, drizzle with some cream cheese frosting. Simply mix the cream cheese with the icing sugar and enough lemon juice to create a thin, but not too runny icing. Drizzle over the spiced pumpkin gut cake and cut into slices to serve!
