Fall is the season for squash of all kinds – pumpkins, butternut, acorn and many other types, and I love them all. Sometimes there can be too much of a good thing however. After making the stuffed pumpkin from my previous post, we finished all the stuffing and some of the pumpkin flesh, but after three days, we were still left with a lot and were bored with eating buttered pumpkin again. Rather than continue to eat it all as a vegetable, I took some of it and whirred it in the food processor to use in these muffins.
I found the recipe on the internet from a website called Celebrating Sweets, and let me tell you, the muffin part was delicious and a great way to use up some of the leftover pumpkin, but that crumb topping — oh my. It just took the muffins to a new level. I think I’m going to keep cooking up more pumpkins just to have the leftover for these muffins. Or maybe I’ll just buy a can of pureed pumpkin instead and make it easy on myself. I may pour the batter into a cake tin and make this as a cake next time.
Hope you all have a wonderful Thanksgiving!
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In a medium bowl, combine sugars, cinnamon, salt, and melted butter.
Whisk until combined.
Add flour, and stir until the flour is combined.
Set aside.
FOR THE MUFFINS:
Preheat oven to 350°F.
Grease a 12 cup muffin tin, or line with paper liners.
In a medium bowl, combine flour, cinnamon/spice, baking soda, baking powder, and salt.
In a large bowl, whisk eggs, brown sugar, oil, pumpkin puree and vanilla, until combined.
Add flour mixture, and stir until combined (I use a rubber spatula), being careful not to over-mix.
Divide the batter between 12 muffin cups.
Pinch off small pieces of the crumb topping and scatter them over the tops of each muffin.
Bake for approximately 20 minutes, until a toothpick inserted into the center of the muffins comes out clean.
Place the pan on a wire rack to cool for 10 minutes, then remove the muffins from the pan and place on the rack to cool completely.
FOR THE ICING:
Whisk all ingredients until smooth.
Adjust the consistency by adding more powdered sugar (to thicken) or more milk (to thin). Use a small spoon to drizzle icing over the tops of the cooled muffins.
I had to update this post to let you know that as much as I loved this recipe the first time I made it, with a “traditional” pumpkin that cropped up in my son’s garden totally by accident (a so-called “volunteer” plant), I made it again for my book group with a purchased “cheese pumpkin,” and it was a game changer. The squat, tan-colored cheese pumpkin doesn’t taste anything like cheese, but is named that because of its resemblance to a wheel of cheese.
The interior is brightly colored orange, and is related to butternut squash. It has a sweet flesh that tastes much like butternut squash and is superior over traditional pumpkins for both savory or sweet dishes, including pumpkin pie.
I filled it with the same recipe I used in the original post, even though the cheese pumpkin weighed twice as much as the pumpkin in the original post. The filling came only about 2/3 of the way up the pumpkin rather than all the way up to the top. No matter, the filling rises somewhat after baking because of the eggs. It’s actually better not to fill the pumpkin all the way to the top anyway, since otherwise, there won’t be room for the lid to fit securely.Here’s what the pumpkin looked like about about 2 1/2 hours in the oven. Be sure to remove the lid after about two hours of cooking because the pumpkin contained a lot of water. I actually drained away the water from the pan after removing the lid, then placed it back in the oven without the lid to “brown” the stuffing.
Another tip is to cube the bread and toss with the melted butter in a cookie sheet, rather than brown the bread cubes in a skillet as I did originally. Toast the bread cubes with melted butter in a 375 degree oven for about 15 minutes, stirring them a few times to brown them evenly. Also, after the pumpkin has been roasting for a couple of hours, you may want to cover the sides so that they don’t burn (but keep the top uncovered in order to promote browning of the stuffing).
ORIGINAL POST:
I just love it when Mother Nature gives you some of her bounty without your even trying. It happened recently when a butternut squash grew in my garden as a “volunteer” plant among my rose bushes, and again when my son discovered a long vine with several pumpkins he hadn’t planted growing in his front yard. Either the birds or the wind carried seeds to these new places that provided fertile ground for the welcome plants.
We weren’t sure at first what kind of squash or pumpkin we were dealing with, since it was green for so long.
But as the cold weather progressed, the pumpkin started to turn orange on the bottom.
And the interior certainly looked like the typical orange jack o’lantern. I decided to use my lagniappe in a recipe I’d read about long ago in a memoir called “A Thousand Days in Venice” by Marlena De Blasi. I made several adjustments however, since I felt the amount of cheese in it was excessive (believe me, there’s still a lot of cheese in it). It would also make a spectacular showstopper dish at the Thanksgiving table.
Start by carving out the lid, and scooping out all the stringy stuff and seeds from inside.
Take some good bread (I used ciabatta) and cube it, tossing it in butter until browned.
Saute some mushrooms and onions in butter, adding some fresh sage leaves to give a bit more flavor.
Mix the mushrooms and onions with eggs and three different kinds of cheese – mascarpone, Emmanthaler and Parmesan. Marlena’s recipe calls for three cups of mascarpone, but I cut that way back to one cup and it was just fine. I cut back the amounts on the other cheeses too, and the dish was still plenty cheese flavored.
Layer the cheese mixture into the pumpkin with the bread, making several layers and ending with the cheese mixture.
Place the lid on top and bake in the oven for about 1 1/2 – 2 hours, removing the lid for the final 20 minutes to brown the top. Pierce the flesh with a knife to see if it’s soft and if it’s not, leave it in the oven a bit longer.
Remove from the oven and bring to the table amid oohs and aahs. Scoop out some of the flesh and some of the pumpkin for each person. We had lots of leftover pumpkin after the stuffing was all gone, and it was great for leftovers one night. But I blitzed the rest in a food processor and used it to make the best pumpkin muffins I’ve ever eaten. Stay tuned in the next blog post for that recipe.
By the way, if your pumpkin was too small to hold all the stuffing, place the rest in small buttered ramekins and bake them another night. They make a great side dish — a kind of mushroom bread pudding.
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Are you a fan of the Great British Baking Show? It’s a competition show, but not at all like the American baking shows, where the participants can be cutthroat and nasty. Instead, everyone is so supportive of the fellow bakers, and you feel genuinely sorry when someone gets eliminated. The show is my antidote to when the bad news cycle gets me down. It’s a feel-good show that always makes me want to rush to the kitchen and bake something.
Recently, I was searching for a recipe to use some of the lemons that had ripened on my indoor lemon tree. I almost hate picking them, but the one year I left them on the tree to admire them longer than I should have, they were dried out by the time I harvested them. So this year, I made haste to pick two lemons as soon as they turned completely yellow. They were bursting with juice and I was bursting with a desire to bake something with them.I turned to a recipe from the “Classic” cookbook by Mary Berry, former host of The Great British Baking Show, and a noted British food writer. I was gifted the cookbook last year by my daughter’s boyfriend, when the two of them came from London for Christmas. The ingredients are posted in metric, and since I use a kitchen scale, it was easy to proceed as written. However, I made a few adjustments — substituting butter for the “cold baking spread” called for in the recipe, adding some limoncello to get more lemony flavor and a couple of other changes. While I was weighing the ingredients, I also measured them in cups, so I could write the recipe for American readers who might not use a kitchen scale. However if you don’t have a kitchen scale, I highly recommend you get one. They’re infinitely useful, and so much more accurate for baking than using measuring cups.
I also made twice the amount of icing and decorated with colorful pistachios I had stashed in the freezer from a trip to Sicily last year. Toasted slivered almonds would be great here too, or just use the lemon zest called for in the recipe. Either way, the cake is delicious with its strong lemony flavor and tender, delicate crumb. It also feeds a crowd, so keep that in mind next time you’re invited to bring something to an event.
Incidentally, the winner of the copper water pitcher giveaway (chosen by a random number computer-driven generator) is Karen, of Karen Cooks.
Click here to connect with me on Instagram and find out what Ciao Chow Linda is up to in the kitchen (and other places too.
Lemon Sheet Cake
Author: Ciao Chow Linda
Adapted from Double Lemon Traybake from “Classic” by Mary Berry
