Easy Vegan Pumpkin Pie to use your leftover pumpkin

I was determined to use up my pumpkins in cooking this year and not just throw them away so as well as this pumpkin and gnocchi gratin I made a pumpkin pie. I've made a pumpkin cheesecake (vegan) before, and this chocolate pumpkin cheesecake, but I've never made an actual pumpkin pie before.

I was spending the weekend with friends so a pie seemed like a nice thing to take; one friend is vegan so I needed to find a vegan recipe. I had a look online and ended up creating my own recipe based on this one from Yummy Mummy Kitchen, but using shop-bought shortcrust pastry, which is vegan, and using my fresh pumpkin rather than canned, coconut milk and cornflour to thicken, and brown sugar and golden syrup to sweeten it. The end result was a soft baked pie filling, almost the consistency of a baked cheesecake, which tasted delicious! It was very popular with my friends, vegan and non-vegan alike.

See below for the full recipe - I also want to mention here the vacuum seal food storage container from Ozeri that I used to transport and store my pie in. You get two large domed containers in the pack, and you simply close the valve at the top and push down to create a vaccum seal; when you want to open the container just open the valve. This keeps the food fresh and there's also a handy dial you turn to show which day you put the food in the container. They are fairly large to store but are a nice sturdy design and I like the fact that the lid is clear plastic so you can see what's inside, so this is also a nice way to serve food for instance when you are outside in the summer and want to keep the insects away!

 

It's currently available on the UK Amazon site but with fairly high shipping costs as it comes from the US, or you can find it on other Amazon sites which are cheaper to ship to the UK.

So here's how I made my pumpkin pie
Serves 10-12

Flesh from one large pumpkin, skin removed, chopped
500g shortcrust pastry block
The cream from the top of a 400ml tin of coconut milk plus some of the milk making up 200ml in total
150ml golden syrup
75g brown sugar
1 tsp ground cinnamon
1 tsp ground nutmeg
3 tbsp. cornflour

Stew the chopped pumpkin in a pan of boiling water until softened then drain. Allow to cool then pulse in a food processor until you have a smooth puree.

Preheat oven to 180C. Roll out the pastry and use to line either a deep tart tin or a loose bottomed cake tin. Line with greaseproof paper and fill with baking beans and blind bake in a preheated oven for 15-20 minutes until the pastry is starting to turn golden brown. Remove from the oven and allow to cook while you make the filling.

In a large bowl, mix the pumpkin puree, coconut cream and milk, golden syrup, brown sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg and cornflour and beat until smooth.

Pour into the pie crust and return to the oven for 45 minutes. If the top of the pie starts to brown too much, cover with foil.

 

Remove from the oven and leave to cool then chill overnight in the fridge - this should make the filling set.

I'm sharing this with Baking Crumbs hosted by Jo's Kitchen Larder and CookBlogShare hosted by EasyPeasyFoodie.
 

Thanks to Ozeri for the food storage containers to review.

Sticky Ginger and Apple Flapjacks

When I was a child I remember my mum and sister making some flapjacks that were so sticky, we were picking bits of kitchen towel off them as we ate - they had been kept in a Tupperware dish lined with kitchen paper and were almost oozing with golden syrup.

I love sticky, soft flapjack, but not that soft - they need to hold together and be slightly chewy at the edges but soft and buttery in the middle. This recipe offers just that.

These were made in preparation of my sister and her partner coming to visit to meet their new niece, and even though I only made them the day before, about half the pan had been eaten before they even arrived!

The recipe is based on one from Good Housekeeping's The Baking Book; I halved the quantities but also added grated apple for extra flavour as I had a few apples that needed using up. The result was absolutely delicious and the texture was perfect.

Here's what I did:
You need:

175g butter or marg (I used Stork)
135g caster sugar
120g golden syrup
225g rolled oats
1 tsp ground ginger
2 apples, peeled and grated

Preheat oven to 175C. Grease and line a square cake tin.

Heat the butter, sugar and golden syrup in a saucepan over a gentle heat until melted. Stir in the rolled oats, ginger and apple until combined.

Spoon into the cake tin and press down gently to spread the mixture out and flatten it. Bake for 30 minutes until the edges have turned golden brown and slightly crispy; the middle will still be soft and sticky.

 

 I'm sharing this with Only Crumbs Remain
 and CookBlogShare.
 

 

Nigella's Roly Poly Pudding

What do you do with leftover pastry? I do make my own but sometimes buy ready-made pastry, even shortcrust (which is really easy to make). As it often comes in a frozen block and you have to defrost the whole thing, I’m then left with pastry to use up.

 

Quick puddings that don’t need a lot of prep are always popular in my house so when I came across a recipe in Nigella Express for Roly Poly Pudding I decided to make it. I remembered jam roly poly from school (which I never ate, as I had packed lunches rather than school dinners) but this recipe didn’t involve jam; I’m sure you could quite easily work out the appropriate point in the process to add it though.

  

 

The recipe can be found on Nigella’s website so I won’t repeat it; there’s barely anything to do anyway and you can adjust the quantities to fit the amount of pastry you have left over.

 

Simply preheat the oven, roll out the pastry and put it on a piece of greaseproof paper. Pour over the golden syrup, leaving a gap all around the edge. The syrup wasn’t as runny as I’d expected and it did stay put on the pastry. There was a little leakage when I moved the pastry though which is why I recommend putting it on a piece of greaseproof paper.

 

 

Grease a large oven proof dish and roll up the pastry from the short end. Transfer it to the oven proof dish, with the seam underneath, and pour the milk down the sides.

 

 

Bake in the oven for 30 minutes and slice to serve, hot – possibly with ice cream.

 

 

This is a very sweet dessert that tastes pretty naughty but is great when you want something stodgy in cold weather.

 

This recipe appears in Nigella Express, which you can buy here:
 

Dairy-free Vegan Frozen Cupcakes - Golden Syrup Flavour

I love Frozen - and I'm clearly not the only one! In my opinion it's the best Disney movie in years with a strong feminist message and a brilliant song from Idina Menzel. Judging by the amount of merchandise available in the shops, from fancy dress costumes to Frozen shampoo and showergel at Poundland, not to mention all the Frozen-inspired birthday cakes I've seen online, children everywhere are captivated consumers of all things Elsa, Anna and Olaf.

My friend has a lovely daughter who just turned 6 at the end of November and I wanted to make some cupcakes when they came to my house a week or so later. My friend is vegan so I wanted her to be able to eat the cakes but I also wanted to decorate them in the Frozen theme. I didn't have time to do anything massively elaborate so I bought some rice paper Frozen pictures to use as cupcake toppers from Amazon. I already had some snowflake sprinkles at home which I thought would be perfect to add on top. Icy blue is the colour most associated with Frozen - it's the colour of Elsa's dress for instance - so that had to be the colour of the icing.

For the cakes themselves, I used the golden syrup cupcake recipe from Ms Cupcake's The Naughtiest Vegan Cakes in Town. I didn't alter the recipe in any way so can't really reprint it as it isn't my own. Suffice to say if you are interested to know what goes in to vegan cupcakes, you replace the butter with oil, and use a little white wine or cider vinegar mixed with soya milk as a sort of egg substitute. These cakes contain golden syrup and are also drizzled with a little golden syrup while still warm which is lovely.

I made some vegan buttercream by using Pure margarine substitute, icing sugar and a little Sugarflair gel colour paste in baby blue, which I piped on top of the cupcakes.

I then added the snowflake sprinkles and the Frozen cupcake toppers.

 

I'm sharing these with Ness at Jibber Jabber UK for her Love Cake challenge as the theme this month is December treats.

 

I'm sending this to Family Foodies, hosted by Vanesther at Bangers and Mash, and on alternate months Louisa at Eat Your Veg as the theme is festive food and these are pretty festive.

 

I'm also sharing these cupcakes with Treat Petite, hosted by Kat at the Baking Explorer and Stuart at Cakeyboi, as they also have a Christmas theme this month.

 

 

Finally I'm sending these to Tea Time Treats; hosted by Karen at Lavender and Lovage and Jane at the Hedgecombers, it has a lovely theme this month of glitter, sprinkles and shiny stuff.

 

 

Mini Treacle Tarts

These may not look like much, but according to my boyfriend they taste delicious!

I wanted a bite-sized dessert option that wouldn't take too long to make so these were ideal. I found the recipe on the internet but adapted it as rather than weigh out quantities I played it by ear. I used Jus-Rol shortcrust pastry though if you want you can make your own.

Roll out the pastry and cut out circles. Spray a baking tin with Cake Release - you can use a mini tart tin, or a shallow cupcake tin, but here I found another use for the whoopie pie tin I was given a couple of years ago.

Add about 1 tbsp of fresh white breadcrumbs onto the centre of each pastry case and spread out evenly.

Drizzle 1 heaped tsp of golden syrup over the top and allow to soak in.

Bake in a preheated oven at 180C for 15-20 minutes.

I have to admit it was a bit of a job getting these out of the pan (as you can see!) and it probably would have been easier to make a large treacle tart and cut it into slices, but I wanted these to be bite sized. They are best served warm, maybe with some cream - though they are very sweet, so you won't want too many!

I'm sending this to Dead Easy Desserts, a blog challenge hosted by Maison Cupcake, for desserts that take 30 minutes or less to make.

I'm also sending this to Cakeyboi's Treat Petite, as the theme is baking small treats for loved ones, and my boyfriend loved these!

Sticky Ginger Cake

Last weekend I went to a car show with my family and wanted to take something as a snack. It needed to travel well (as we were driving quite a long way to get there, then walking around at the show all day) and be easy and not messy to eat. I only decided to make something the night before, so also needed to use ingredients I already had in the house. This ginger cake ticked all those boxes. The recipe is a combination of the Fresh Gingerbread with Lemon Icing in Nigella's How to be a Domestic Goddess and this one which I found online here (which was itself a version of Nigella's recipe). I left off the icing so I could wrap the cake up in foil; it didn't seem to lack anything for it.

You need:

2/3 cup butter

3/4 cup brown sugar

1/2 cup honey

1/3 cup black treacle

1/3 cup golden syrup

1 tsp ginger puree

1 tsp ground cinnamon

1 cup plain yogurt

2 eggs

1 tsp bicarbonate of soda

2 and 1/3 cups plain flour

Place the butter, sugar, honey, treacle, syrup, ginger and cinnamon in a pan. 

Heat gently until the butter has melted and sugar has dissolved and you have a thick liquid.

Mix the eggs, yogurt and bicarb of soda in a bowl.

Mix the butter and treacle mixture in to the flour and add the egg mixture.

Pour into a greased square cake tin and bake at 170C for about half an hour.

 Remove from tin and cut into squares. If you want to make the icing from Nigella's recipe, just mix lemon juice and icing sugar with a little warm water and spread over the cake with a palette knife when the cake has cooled.

The letter for this month's Alphabakes challenge is G so I am sending this ginger cake to my co-host for the challenge, Ros from The More Than Occasional Baker, who is taking care of the challenge this month.

My tin of black treacle had been hanging around in the cupboard for longer than I like to imagine, and I was able to use up what was left in this recipe, and I also used up the end of a pot of yogurt, so I am sending this to the No Waste Food Challenge, hosted this month by Elizabeth's Kitchen on behalf of Turquoise Lemons.

Ginger is the ingredient for August's Feel Good Food Challenge, hosted by Victoria of A Kick at the Pantry Door  so I am sending in this recipe.