Blair Waldorf Must Pie!

Before we get to all the christmas-y stuff I still have one recipe to post that is connected with a holiday that's not Christmas, but ... Thanksgiving! If you haven't spent all your life in a cave, you know that Thanksgiving always falls on the fourth Thursday in November, and that was last week. We don't really celebrate Thanksgiving in Germany but I'll be damned if I pass up on a holiday that gives me an excuse to bake something as delicious as Pumpkin Pie.

This year's pie is even better than last year's, and that's saying something...!

 Pumpkin Pie
(Recipe by flour and butter)

170 g/1.5 cups flour
0.5 tsp salt
0.5 cups butter
60-120 ml/0.25-0.5 cups cold water
450 g/2 cups pumpkin puree
150 g/0.75 cups brown sugar
1.25 tsp ground cinnamon
1 tsp ground ginger
0.5 tsp salt
0.5 tsp cardamon
1 pinch nutmeg
0.25 tsp ground cloves
4 eggs
360 ml/1.5 cups single/light cream

Cut up the butter. Mix flour and salt in a medium bowl, then add the butter. Add a little of the cold water and knead until you have a slightly sticky dough, adding more water or flour if necessary. Wrap up the dough and put in the fridge for at least an hour.

Preheat the oven to 200° C/400° F, then take the dough out of the fridge, roll it out and put it in a pie tin. (If you're as lazy as me you can skip the rolling out, just put the dough in the pie tin and squish it around until the tin is lined.) Line with aluminium foil and pre-bake for about 15 minutes.

In the meantime, combine the pumpkin, brown sugar, cinnamon, ginger, salt, cardamon, nutmeg, and cloves in a large bowl. Add eggs and beat lightly for a few minutes, then add the cream and combine.

Take the pie tin with the pre-baked crust out of the oven, remove the foil, and pour in the filling. Then cover the tin with foil again and put it back into the oven. Be careful, the filling is very, very thin. I had some filling left over which I poured into a smaller tin and baked with the pie. Served hot, it makes a delicious pudding!

Bake for 20 minutes, then remove the foil and bake for another 25-35 minutes. It's done when a toothpick inserted in the centre comes out clean.

Let it cool, then cut into slices and eat, preferably while watching the Thanksgiving episode from the first series of Gossip Girl.

Pumpkin brown butter cupcakes

Having someone staying for a visit always is a perfect excuse for baking something. Not that I really needed an excuse but it's always nice to have one that you can shove into your conscience's mouth when it starts nagging.
And yes, it's yet another pumpkin recipe. You'll just have to live with it. The pumpkin madness will only continue for a few more days because next weekend it's the first Advent and that means the beginning of christmas biscuit time. Lots and lots of baking. Can't wait.

Back to the recipe. I've been wanting to make pumpkin cupcakes since September but never found a recipe I really liked. This one is adapted from Bake Me Blush and has just the perfect balance of moisture, spices, sweetness and pumpkin taste. Unfortunately, it contains an awful lot of butter and sugar... But it's totally worth it, trust me.

Fresh from the oven, iced and sprinkled. I don't really like those extremely sugary sweet icings, so I substituted maple syrup for half of the icing sugar. The sprinkles were my flatmate's idea, though. Credit where credit is due.

Yum!

I (or my camera) didn't manage to capture the fabulous colour, they look much more intensly orange on the inside. Well, I should say, "they looked". They're already gone.

Pumpkin brown butter cupcakes
(adapted from Bake Me Blush)

Makes for 14 cupcakes

For the cupcakes:
165 g/0.75 cup unsalted butter, room temperature, plus more for tins
165 g/1.6 cups all-purpose flour
2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
1/4 tsp nutmeg
1/8 tsp ground cloves
225 g/1 cup pumpkin puree
200 g/1 cup packed brown sugar
115 g/0.5 cup white sugar
2 large eggs

 

For the filling:
55 g/0.25 cup unsalted butter
60 g/0.5 cup sifted icing sugar (I was out of icing sugar and used normal caster sugar which worked out OK, but I'd still recommend using icing sugar.)

120 ml/0.5 cup maple syrup
1 tsp pure vanilla extract
1 Tbsp milk, plus more if needed

Preheat oven to 180° C/325° F. Grease your muffin tins or insert baking cases.

In a saucepan, melt butter over medium heat. Cook until butter turns golden brown, stir from time to time. Remove from the heat and let cool. 

Mix flour, baking powder, salt, cinnamon, nutmeg, and cloves. In another bowl, mix pumpkin puree, both sugars, eggs, and brown butter mixture. Add flour mixture and whisk until just combined.

Pour the batter into the muffin tins, filling each almost to the top. Bake until a toothpick inserted in centre comes out clean, about 30 minutes. 

Meanwhile, in a small saucepan over medium heat, melt butter and cook until brown. Remove from the heat, add icing sugar, maple syrup, vanilla, and 1 tablespoon milk, and combine. 

Ice the cupcakes while still warm and put some sprinkles on top if you feel like it.

Eat. Warning: They're addictive.

Flapjacks

Monday was an absolutely awful day for me. I won't go into the details, let me just say that I got into a row with my ex-flatmate, felt depressed anyway, had trouble with our electricity provider and my ex-landlord, and the cold that had already announced itself last Wednesday finally kicked in (yay! (not).  I've almost got over it by now). In short: I felt like the whole world had turned on me. 

On days like that, for me, there are only two things to do: (1) Make yourself a nice cup of hot chocolate, snuggle up in a blanket, turn up the heat, and watch a movie, (2) get in the kitchen and bake something. Anything. Preferably biscuits or something like that. 

I went for option 2 (when you have a cold, milk and chocolate aren't that good, anyway) and decided to make flapjacks. Not American flapjacks which, as you might know, are some sort of pancakes, but British flapjacks, in other regions of the world mundanely known as muesli bars.

 

 The basic recipe is, of course, by Sophie, but I made quite a few modifications. You can really get creative with flapjacks. As long as you get the ratio honey/syrup to butter, and honey/syrup/butter to dry ingredients right, you can use whatever you want.

They came out a little more flat (and as a consequence also a lot more brittle) than I intended them to which, of course, was entirely my fault: It said in the recipe that you should use a medium-sized deep baking tray, and that the thickness of the flapjacks depends on the size of the tray. I ignored this and just spread the mixture on a normal (=large), shallow baking tray, thinking that would work. Well, it didn't. The flapjacks mixture spread about 2 inches on each side, something that a smaller, deeper baking tray would propably have prevented.

 

No matter how they look, they taste de-li-cious and make a nice snack for breaks between classes. Or for tea. Or breakfast. Or whenever.

Flapjacks

(Basic recipe by Sophie Dahl)

Makes for 12-24 pieces, depending on how large a baking tray you use

 

2 Tbsp runny honey

2 Tbsp golden syrup

2 Tbsp black treacle (if you don't like it, you can leave out the treacle and substitute 1 Tbsp runny honey and golden syrup respectively)

150 g/2.25 cups butter (Sophie uses salted, I don't)

150 g/1.5 cups porridge oats

75 g/0.5 cup dried cranberries

50 g/0.5 cup chocolate chips

100 g/1.5 cups julienned and flaked almonds, mixed

Preheat the oven to 180° C/350° F.

Grease a medium sized, deep baking tray. Remember: The size of the tray will determine the thickness of the flapjacks.

Melt the honey, golden syrup, treacle and butter in a heavy-bottomed pan over a low heat. Stir until combined, then remove from the heat.

Mix all the dry ingredients, then add them to the molten butter and syrup.

Spread the mixture onto the baking tray and smoothe it down.

Put into the oven and bake for 25-30 minutes.

Cut the flapjacks into pieces as long as they're still hot. Allow to cool, then take them out of the tray and store in a dry, cool place.

They crumble quite a lot which annoyed me at first until I came up with the idea to sprinkle the crumbs on yogurt and have that for breakfast. Yum!

Pumpkin Cheesecake Brownies

A couple of days ago autumn finally arrived. And I don't mean autumn as in pumpkins at the farmer's market and halloween costumes in the stores but autumn as in coolish, windy weather with grey clouds chasing each other across the sky, trees turning yellow and shedding their leaves and people pulling out their woollen coats, scarves and hats.

I love autumn almost as much as winter. I love the chilly air in the mornings with the mist over the meadows, the damp smell of the air and the yellow and brown of the leaves gleaming in the afternoon sunlight, I love going for a long walk wrapped in a warm coat and a big scarf, with my pretty autumn boots at my feet and returning with a cold face, rosy cheeks and windswept hair. I love sitting at home on a rainy day with lit candles, a cuppa and some biscuits, listening to Laura Marling on the stereo and dawdling away the time, or watching a film while lying on the bed, snuggled up with a warm blanket and a cup of hot cocoa.

Another good thing about autumn is the start of the winter term in mid-October. Don't get me wrong, I love summer hols. But after 2 months of no courses and only an occasional term paper or test, I tend to get extremely bored and my brain yearns for something to do. If you say "swot" now, I'll hit you.

But the best thing about autumn is that it's the season of harvest. Which means food. Loads of food. And I love, LOVE autumn food.

Pumpkins, grains, parsnips, sweet potatoes, beetroots, chestnuts, spices, apples, pears. Autumn, for me, means colourful, earthy food that warms your soul and your eyes as well as your stomach. Soups, gratins, purees and pies. I can't wait.

This autumn, pumpkin will call the tune. I plan to let it star in syrups, pies, cupcakes, pancakes, brownies and much more. I already made some amazing healthy and tasty pumpkin dishes in September but I promise to make them again and post the recipes.

The first recipe on this blog is incidentally also the first thing I baked in my new kitchen in my new flat. So I thought to myself, I could as well start my blog and life in my new flat with my new flatmate (and good friend, here's to you!) off with a bang, or better: a calorie bomb for the hips and an explosion for the taste buds: Pumpkin Cheesecake Brownies. Your life will never be the same. Cross my heart and hope to die.

Pumpkin Cheesecake Brownies 

(find the picture in my header; recipe adapted from Confections of a Foodie Bride)

Ingredients

8 Tbsp butter

8 oz / 225 g bittersweet chocolate, chopped

1 cup / 200 g+ 2 Tbsp sugar

4 large eggs

1 cup / 125 g + 2 Tbsp flour

1/4 cup / 30 g cocoa powder (the darker and the less de-oiled the better)

1/2 tsp baking powder

1/2 tsp salt

4 oz/200 g reduced-fat cream cheese, at room temp

1/2 cup/250 g canned pumpkin

1 tsp vanilla

1/2 tsp ground cinnamon

1/2 tsp ground nutmeg

1/8 tsp ground cloves

1/8 tsp ground all spice

1/4 tsp ground ginger

- If canned pumpkin isn't available at your local supermarket, you'll have to make the pumpkin puree yourself: Cut 250 g of pumpkin or winter squash (I prefer onion squash) in thin slices, put them on a baking tray covered with baking parchment and bake at 200° C for about half an hour.

- Grease a square 8-inch/20-cm baking tin or something similar. I didn't have one and used a round tarte tin.

- In a bain-marie, melt butter and chocolate together and whisk until completely smooth. Be careful not to let any water from the bain-marie get into the chocolate-butter-mixture because for some reason, the water makes it turn into a tough, unusable lump.

- Whisk in the sugar and then add 3 of the eggs, one at a time, whisking between each addition.

- Whisk in the flour, cocoa, baking powder, and salt. Use a wooden spoon for that, the batter will get too tough for a handheld mixer or an egg whisk.

- The batter will by now have reached the consistency of something resembling greasy chocolatey bubble gum but that's what it's supposed to look like, don't worry. Transfer it to the greased tin and spread it evenly.

- In a separate bowl, beat cream cheese and 2 Tbsp sugar until light and fluffy, about 2 minutes.

- When the pumpkin is ready, transfer it to a blender and puree it. Add the puree to the cream cheese and beat until thoroughly combined. Beat in the egg and vanilla, then add 2 Tbsp flour and the ground spices. I used freshly ground nutmeg but was a bit over-enthusiastic and ended up using nearly twice the required amount. It didn't hurt. And I was out of ginger, so I used ground cardamon instead. You can never go wrong with cardamon.

- Create wells in the top of the brownie batter. Spoon the pumpkin cheesecake mixture into the wells. Use the tip of a knife to swirl the chocolate and pumpkin together. I didn't manage that very well, but I think I like the brownies better with the pumpkin cheesecake on top of the chocolate dough instead of swirled into it, anyway.

- Bake until a toothpick inserted in center comes out with a few moist crumbs attached, 40-50 minutes. Cool in pan for 30 minutes then cut into squares and serve.

Happy eating!