Spiced pumpkin cake

Spiced pumpkin cake

It’s the one time of year when you can get a pumpkin and I love pumpkin based desserts!

Ingredients

1&2/3 cups flour

1 cup sugar

¾ cup pureed pumpkin innards (½ for cake, ¼ for icing)

1/2 cup dairy free milk

1/3 cup oil

1 teaspoon vinegar

1 tsp vanilla essence

Spices: cinnamon, nutmeg, mixed spice

Preheat oven to 180°

1. Scoop out the innards of the pumpkin. Blend innards until a smoothie like consistency.

2. Mix sugar, flour and spices together. Add soya milk, oil, vanilla essence and ½ cup of the blended pumpkin.

3. Add vinegar and mix well. Pour into cake pan and bake for 30-40mins or until toothpick comes out clean.

For the icing we mixed 1/5-1/4 cup pumpkin puree with icing sugar enough to be stiff.

We roasted the pumpkin seeds, and Conor made a robot pumpkin to put in the window. 

Blackberry chocolate cake with blackberry icing

Blackberry chocolate cake with blackberry icing

Finally an excuse to bake! I’m in final med and it’s been I haven’t had much time for the joys of cooking/baking. It’s my friend Jen’s birthday and apparently her favourite types of cake are chocolate or berry cakes, so I thought I’d combine the two!

-1½ cups self raising flour

- 1 cup sugar

-1/2 cup soya milk

- 1 small pot blackberry soya yogurt (eg Alpro)

- ½ cup oil

- 3 tbsp cocoa powder

- 1 tsp vanilla essence

- 1 tbsp vinegar

Icing: 1 cup (~350g) Icing sugar, ½ pot blackberry soya yogurt, 1 tsp butter, dairy free chocolate clusters.

Preheat oven to 180°

1. Mix the flour, sugar and cocoa powder.

2. Mix the soya milk, yogurt, oil and vanilla essence. Add to the dry mix above.

3. Add vinegar and bake for about 20-30mins or until a toothpick comes out clean.

4. Mix the icing ingredients together and decorate the top.

Lovely and quick! But oh so very filling!

Was eaten fairly quick too.

Potato Curry filled Savoury Pancakes

Potato Curry filled Savoury Pancakes

Firstly, apologies for anyone that reads this much for the lack of posts – we’re currently looking for a place to live (last 6.5 weeks now!) and haven’t use of an oven for the most part. Conor finally got a chance to make something at his parents’ house at the weekend.

Hopefully will find a place soon and can get back to real cooking!

(Also, my camera is on the fritz so apologies if these photos are not as quite picturesque- they were taken on a phone!) 

Pancakes 3 cups flour 1/2 cup dairy free butter 1 tbsp oil 1/2--2/3 litre soya milk 1 cup water cumin, parsley, turmeric  to taste

Filling (or can be any vegetables you like) 5 small potatoes 2 tomatoes 1 can chickpeas 1 red pepper 2 pok choi 4 spring onions 1/2 courgette 5 broccoli florets 1 pack soya cream (or 1 can coconut milk) 2-3 tbsp Curry powder 3 garlic Cumin, black pepper to taste

1. Chop up the potatoes small and boil them.

2. Mix the pancake ingredients together in a bowl. Conor feels he was slightly approximate with the recipe and suggests you mix the ingredients so that they form a figure of 8 sign and the batter is of a yogurt like consistency. Add more liquid/flour if you need. 

3. Drop about a little less than a ladle (depends on the size of your pan) of the liquid onto a preheated pan with some oil spread on it. Cook on a low heat, and flip when necessary.

4. Chop up all the vegetables and cook in a pan/wok on a medium-high heat. Add the potatoes when boiled.

5. Add the cream/coconut milk and then the spices and curry powder to taste. Spoon into the cooked pancakes. 

 

 Savoury pancakes may sound weird, but we had a very similar dish in a fancy restaurant in Edinburgh two years ago and it tasted amazing so we decided to make it! 

We also made falafel filled savoury pancake wraps months ago; the recipe is the same for the pancake mix, then for the inside just add falafel, tomatoes, mixed beans and houmous etc. 

(Houmous tastes good on everything!)  

Lemon Ginger Cake with Chocolate and Blueberries

Lemon Ginger Cake with Chocolate and Blueberries

The summer’s nearing an end and this time next week I’ll be packing my bag for college the next day.

So on this Sunday some fresh summery baking was done to savour those last moments of freedom.

Ingredients:

Rind of 1 lemon

¼ cup lemon juice (from the rinded lemon or otherwise)

1½ cups self raising flour

1 cup sugar

1/5 cup oil

1 tsp. vinegar

2 tsp ground ginger (or fresh)

3/4 cup water

Preheat oven to 180°

1. Leave some lemon rind to the side if wanting to use on top. Mix flour, sugar, ginger and lemon rind.

2. Add lemon juice, water and oil. Add vinegar. Mix.

3. Bake for 15-20mins or until lightly browned.

We topped it with some melted chocolate, blueberries and a sprinkle of the remaining lemon rind.

Mushroom Pesto Lasagne

Mushroom Pesto Lasagne

One of my favourite dishes to have is avocado pesto pasta… It’s so good and creamy. This week Aldi was selling a pack of two avocados for 49c… so this just had to be made. And I love mushrooms. Love love mushrooms. So this came about…

It’s also a thundery and raining day and just the kind of day to have a cosy romantic meal.

Ingredients (makes a big casserole dish enough for 4-7 people, depending on appetite) 1 pack lasagne sheets (depending on size of dish) Pesto: 4 ripe avocados 1/3 – 1/2 cup of basil (depending if dried, frozen or fresh. We used 1/3c of the first two types) 5-6 cloves garlic Juice of 1/2 lemon (~3 tbsp lemon juice) 1 can coconut milk (note: if making non lasagne pasta, can leave this out and the above is a lovely avocado pesto sauce!)

Filling: (realistically you can put anything you like in it!) 1 pack mushrooms 1 aubergine 1 can chickpeas/cannelloni beans 1/3 a broccoli 1 onion 1/3 cup walnuts 2-3 sun-dried tomatoes

Preheat oven to 180°

1. Prepare the pesto: slice avocados open and spoon out the inner goodness. Chop the garlic and then add the garlic, lemon juice and basil to the avocado mix. Mash. Add coconut milk.

2. Chop up all the vegetables to desired thicknesses. Fry the onions, then add the rest of the vegetables and cook as normal.

3. Put away about 1/2 cup of the pesto sauce to the side (not necessary persay, as we only thought of it after – otherwise your top layer has veg in it… which isn’t so bad either). Add the rest to the cooked veg/beans mix.

4. In a casserole dish, arrange the lasagne sheets in a layer. Top with a layer of the pesto/veg mix. Add another layer of lasagne sheets and more pesto veg mix. Repeat until out of the mix, then top with a final layer of lasagne sheets. Cover these with the non- veg pesto sauce that was put to the side earlier.

5. Put in oven until top is slightly browned. Enjoy!

 

If you just make some pasta, then the pesto sauce (+/- the coconut milk, depending how you like it), it also tastes amazing.