Pumpkin day recipes

I have come to love pumpkins! Never thought I would say that, but I do. Pumpkins are friendly, lovely creatures.

Not only do they look charming on a doorstep, they are also great fun to carve, the flesh is excellent in soups and cakes, and the seeds are fantastic roasted and seasoned.

We started our pumpkin day with pumpkin soup and bread from a local baker. Obviously it would have been cooler to bake it myself, but some days I am just too lazy. The bread contained pumpkin seeds, so that must count for something, right?

Pumpkin soup:
1 hokkaido pumpkin, cut in cubes
300 ml applejuice
300 ml vegetable stock
200 ml cream
spices to taste, ginger, coriander, cinnamon, salt, pepper

Boil the pumpkin with applejuice and vegetable stock untill tender. Blend the soup and add spices to taste.

Add the cream, and you are ready to taste heaven!

I sprinkled on some roasted pumpkin seeds and added a little olive oil. If you are very cool, you would follow the original recipe from the lovely von Selchow Family and add pumpkin seed oil and green coriander. I just couldn't find either at my supermarked.

Cakes! Oh, lovely, lovely pumpkin cakes.

My sweet friend, Mona, who unfortunately couldn't come, was the woman behind this recipe. And for this I will always be grateful.

It is tasty stuff!

Pumpkin cake with frosting:
1 cup is approximately 250 ml.

2 cups of flour
1 cup of plain pil
2 tsp baking powder
3/4 tsp salt
2 tsp cinnamon
4 eggs
2 cups of sugar
2 cups of pumpkinpure (either storebought or homemade)

Mix egg and sugar. Add oil. In a seperate bowl mix the other ingredients apart from the pumpkin, and add to the egg and sugar. Then add the pumpkin.

In a 200 degrees varm oven bake the cake for .... a while. Monas recipe claims 1 hour and 15 min., but I baked mine for 45 minutes. So keep an eye on the cake.

Frosting:
1/2 cup of soft butter
1 package creamcheese (200 ml)
1 tsp vanilla
1 cup brown sugar

Beat the first three ingredients with a mixer, and then add the brown sugar. Add more sugar, if needed.

When the cake has cooled, put the frosting on top and eat.

And use all your willpower not to eat it all before the guests arrive ... not that I would have that problem, but I am sure some would.

We had some small people in attendence that day, and I let them decorate the frosted cakes with different sprinkles. It was a great hit, sprinkles everywhere, two content children and an added little bit of crunch to the cakes.

I don't have any pictures of the decorating event since I was too busy trying to prevent my living room from being covered in sprinkles.

I also made some iced pumpkin cookies.

Goodness gracious me, they were nice, and easy to make and something completely different from what I normally make. Try them someday! Please, do that for me.

Naturally we also made some roasted pumpkin seeds. I made some sweet and some savoury. Super easy to make, I had all the ingredients at hand, and they were very well received.

There was also a lot of carving going on. Emma made this masterpiece.

That is of course nothing to what she did two years ago, alone and armed only with a knife.



Next year we are definitly having another day where we celebrate harvest time, dig into great pumpkins, drink grape juice, eat cakes and spend time in the best company.

On a final note, though, today Samuel were looking through a book and he was pointing to something, saying "pumpkin, pumpkin". Unfortunately what he was pointing at in the book was a picture of the sun.

I am thinking, that maybe you can also do to much with pumpkins.